


The Heart of the Cards

by Rathaway



Series: Card Tricks [1]
Category: Brave (2012), Guardians of Childhood - William Joyce, How to Train Your Dragon (Movies), Rise of the Guardians (2012), Tangled (Movie)
Genre: Angry Jack, Aster may be Merida's new BFF5EVER, F/F, F/M, Friendship, Gen, M/M, Momma Tooth, Protective Tooth, Sandy and Jack are bros, Self-Isolation, frustrated Aster, past unresolved relationships, so an alien and a dead guy walk into a bar, they're both going on the naughty list this year
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-09-01
Updated: 2017-06-09
Packaged: 2018-02-15 18:31:02
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 14
Words: 38,169
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2239050
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Rathaway/pseuds/Rathaway
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In which Jack wasn't as alone during his 300 plus years as the others have come to believe; but that doesn't necessarily mean he was surrounded by friends.</p><p>[This story has been discontinued and is being rewritten.]</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter One

In the year since Jack had become a guardian, he had been invited to every one of North’s little parties at the Pole. But this is the first time that he’s actually bothered showing up.

It isn’t that he’s antisocial—well, actually yeah, that’s exactly what it is. After all, going from 300 years of the occasional chat with one of a handful of friends, to a room full of crowded people is a bit overwhelming. He’d considered just using the rafters to get from one end of the room to the other, but North had assured him that that would be “rude,” or whatever. Besides, the whole point of him being here is apparently to socialize. Not that he’s doing much of that, actually, so instead he ducks and weaves through the crowd, offering half-hearted smiles here and there, cheeks frosting when Aphrodite “accidentally” brushes a hand along the curve of his backside. He speeds up, bumps into a pair of chattering Naiads, one of whom gazes at him curiously, but without fear.

“Sorry!” he says quickly.

The second Naiad merely smiles at him, her cheeks tinting purple in what he can only assume is something like a blush of her own. “Don’t worry about it,” she assures, even as Jack is backing away from them. He smacks into someone behind him, and a hand comes down on his shoulder, which he tears away from, whipping around to face whoever had touched him.

A very familiar face peers back at him, pale eyebrows raised high at his jumpiness. “Hello, Jack,” Vela says in greeting, as a murmur ripples through the gathering of people around them.

Valkyries generally don’t make an appearance unless someone’s death is within looming distance. And, though it is rare for a Valkyrie to come for a being that is not mortal, that doesn’t mean it’s unheard of.

Jack looks around now, and he isn’t surprised to find that the crowd is giving him and the beautiful blonde a wide berth, whereas before he had felt practically smothered by the curious creatures.

He laughs and says, “You are a life-saver, Vela,” as he pulls her into an exuberant hug. She returns the gesture with force that makes him wheeze, and then pulls back to look at him with an expression as close to amusement as she will probably ever get.

“I think I can honestly say that you are the first to ever say that to me, little frostling.” She glances around at the room, taking in the other party attendees. “We seem to be garnering quite a bit of attention.”

Jack shrugs and lets her out of his hold. “Not like we don’t get plenty of that all on our own anyway.”

“True enough,” Vela admits readily.

Though they probably do make for quite the pair. After all, if Jack has learned anything over the past 319 years, it’s that nothing goes together better than cold and death. The thought gives him pause, reminds him of the battle with Pitch that took place almost exactly a year earlier, but he quickly shakes those dark thoughts away, his full focus returning to his friend.

“What are you doing here, anyway? I mean, it’s been a few decades, but I distinctly remember us agreeing that the whole party scene wasn’t our thing,” he reminds her, and they both cringe in remembrance of Thor’s last big shindig.

“You’re right,” Vela agrees, “We _both_ did, which makes me wonder what you are doing here, Jack.” She shakes her head. “But that is not what I’m here for. Actually, I’m here for you.”

Jack frowns, but before he can say anything, a firm grip on his arm and an even firmer voice has him jerking in place. “I don’t think so, Valkyrie,” Toothiana says at his side, but right now she doesn’t look like the tooth fairy that he knows; instead, she looks every bit the Warrior Queen that her title implies.

“That’s right, Sheila,” a familiar accent says just behind him, as a paw comes down on his shoulder, “ain’t no battles goin’ on ‘round here—so I suggest you pack ‘er up and get goin’.”

“Knock it off!” Jack says, quick and angry, as he shrugs away stifling touches. “You guys wanna back off before you run off one of the few friends I have?” He spits as he spins on them.

Tooth looks at him like he gave her frostbite, and Bunnymund—well, he just looks mad. But at this point, Jack is pretty sure that’s just the guy’s default setting, especially after their encounter barely a month earlier.

He purses his lips and turns back to Vela, clasping her shoulder, but being careful of her wings. He says, “Come on, I know somewhere quiet where we can talk,” and guides her away.

He doesn’t see Toothiana grip Bunny’s arm, or the looks that Sandy and North exchange after having watched everything that went down.

He also doesn’t see the few familiar faces that watch from the edge of the crowd.

“That wasn’t very nice, Jack,” a voice whispers in what feels like his head, though he knows better. But his throat still tickles with the growl he produces as he closes and locks the door to one of the guest rooms. He knows that Vela hears him, but she doesn’t mention it. Jack settles on the bed, but instead of sitting down next to him, as he expects, Vela leans against the wall across from him. It’s strange, because he and Vela have always stuck close together in the time they’ve known each other. That mutual knowledge of years and years of loneliness is what had drawn them together in the first place. Having her within distance of hearing and sight, but not at his side makes him feel anxious.

Whatever Vela has come to tell him, he now knows, is not something that he is going to react well to.

Or at least, that is what the Valkyrie believes.

“C’mon, Angel, what’s got you so nervous?” he asks curiously, using a nickname that he knows will rile her up.

But she doesn’t even scowl at him; instead, she looks bitter, and maybe a little guilty.

“We have known each other a long time, Jackson Overland,” she states, something that’s very much obvious, in more than one way.

But it takes a minute for him to get it.

“Vela…how do you know that name?” Because he sure as hell hasn’t told her—hell, he hasn’t even told the Guardians about his former life, or the name he’d carried when he was living it.

Vela slumps against the wall, and it’s a strange sight for Jack when he’s so used to seeing the warrior standing tall and strong. She says, “Your sacrifice was a great one, Jack; great enough, even, to grant you passage to Valhalla.”

The frost sprite is speechless, for once; quite the oddity for someone who has spent the entirety of their life _and_ afterlife talking, whether he had an audience or not. Sure, he’s got plenty to say, questions by the truck load, anger that’s almost _hot_ , he feels it so passionately. But he has no idea where to start. He stares at Vela and feels, for the first time, like he doesn’t know her—like she is some kind of stranger to him. Which she is, in many ways, because though Vela may be his oldest friend, they had both always preferred solitude to company. Jack knows the warrior’s name, he has seen her work and fought at her side, watched her mourn, comforted her and helped her orchestrate her first prank, but he doesn’t know what her favorite colour is. He doesn’t know the name of her first crush, or if she’s ever been in love, or even if that is something that she is capable of.

Jack wants to rage and throw a tantrum like a child, and he wants to fight against her instead of with her like the warriors that she guides to Valhalla, but he doesn’t. Because Vela is looking at him like she expects him to do just that; like she’d let him, if he really wanted to. But how can he be angry with her when he would have done exactly the same thing—because how do you admit to someone that you watched them die when you only know them half-way?

He sighs like the air in his lungs is something heavy and tangible and rubs a hand over his face, scratches at the ice that crackles and clings to his shoulder under his hoodie. “I didn’t think Valkyries covered the whole sacrifice side of things.”

His friend looks relieved as she says, “It depends on the sacrifice. Perhaps you didn’t mean for it to end the way it did, that day, but when it did, you didn’t regret it. You were just glad for your sister’s safety. That’s what makes you so noble, Jack. I know you wouldn’t change anything that happened that day, no matter what, because in the end, your sister survived. Your love for your sister was so great that you traded your own life for hers.” She gives him a long look, one that makes him squirm and grip his staff white-knuckle tight for something to do. “You are an honorable man, Jack Frost—do not let anyone tell you otherwise. _Especially_ those new friends of yours.”

Wouldn’t exactly call us friends, Jack thinks to say, but the whole centuries-old-friend-witnessing-his-death-but-not-mentioning-it-for-almost-300-years kinda takes precedence. So, instead of addressing his insecurities like the mature three-hundred-plus year old immortal being that he is, he sticks with his priorities and instead says, “Okay, so, wait. You were there that day to take me to Valhalla, right?” Vela inclines her head and quirks a brow in a way that he knows means “just said that,” which picks at the anger bubbling just under his skin, because she definitely doesn’t have the right to be giving him the eyebrow right now. “Well? What happened? I mean, I’m still here; I’ve _been here_ for over 300 years, Vela. What stopped you that day—or should I be asking _who_?”

He doesn’t know why he even bothers asking, because he’s pretty sure he already knows the who.

“From the sound of it, Jack, it would seem that you already have your answer,” the Valkyrie says quietly.

His laughter doesn’t make for a happy sound. “Of course,” he fumes, “I mean, who else would it possibly be? It’s not like there are any other ass-holes who happen to live on the moon and also enjoy playing with me like I’m a damn chess piece.” He makes his way to the window and touches one hand to the frame, letting ice fern out from the tips of fingers that have gone so cold that they’re covered in frost. It’s not something he does consciously—really, his main focus at the moment is that glowing silver rock in the sky, where his “creator” currently resides, no doubt watching him and Vela as they speak. Not that this has been much of a conversation.

“He said you had a purpose; a great destiny that lay ahead,” his friend admits. “And he was right, Jack. You owe me no proof of your valor, because I already knew that you were capable of great things, but the things that you have done in your afterlife—the battles you have won, striking down Pitch—are even greater than what you accomplished when you lived—“

“No!” he shouts, rounding on her with bared teeth, not unlike the wildling that so many have accused him of being throughout his immortal lifetime. “Nothing I have done in this life is greater than what I did in my last; nothing will ever be more important than the day that Pippa lived!”

“You’re right,” Vela agrees, openly and without hesitation.

They stare at each other for a moment, Jack’s heart a furious rhythm against his sternum, and his favorite Valkyrie as infuriatingly calm as ever.

Finally, the elemental inquires, “Why now?” He steps towards Vela, movements easy and much calmer than they were before. “Why tell me all of this now—what’s the point?”

“Because MIM made me a promise, after he brought you back, when he got to you before I could,” the warrior admits. “He promised me that when you remembered your first life, your purpose would be served, and I could guide you to Valhalla, just as I was meant to that night at the lake.”

Once again, Jack sinks to the bed, but now it’s because he feels as though simply standing is too much for him.

He feels tired and he feels old.

“Is that all this has been? You make a deal with some would-be king who lives on a rock in the sky, and my life is forfeit?” His eyes begin to water, and he blinks and blinks to force back the tears, because they always tend to freeze, and picking the ice off the sensitive surface of his eyeballs is painful.

“Oh Jack,” Vela says sadly. She reaches forward and cups his cheek, and he doesn’t bother shaking her off. “Going to Valhalla or staying here…it is your choice, my friend.” Now he shoves her hand away, and he doesn’t even feel sorry when the skin he touches turns a little bit blue.

“Is it?” he demands. “Where was my choice the first 300 years, Vela? Because this doesn’t feel like a choice! It feels like an ultimatum! Be a guardian or go back to being _dead_. Some choice.”

“It’s not like that,” she insists. “Jack—“

“You need to leave,” the winter spirit insists, and then his breath catches in his throat when he recalls last Easter, and what Bunnymund had said to him in the wake of its ruin. The comparison is unsettling, so he adds, “ _please_. I just…need some time. I need to think.”

Vela stares at him, looking more upset than he’s ever seen, and she says, “I understand,” but he doesn’t think she does. She runs calloused hands over her combat suit, as if to smooth out all the invisible wrinkles and pulls her shoulders back, wings ruffling against her shoulder blades. “You know where to find me.”

The flutter of wings displaces the air in the room and, not for the first time, Jack Frost is left on his own.


	2. Chapter Two

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Jack gets a visit from an old friend, one who isn't about to let him take things lying down.

He flies to Antarctica and paces along an ice shelf, starts up a snow storm because he can; because he still mad—huffin’ mad is what Jamie calls it, when he gets worked up over something. But Jack is beyond that, he is—

he’s a mess, that’s what he is.

He is also…very much not alone, anymore.

“He’s right, you know,” says Tate, as he manifests himself into a more human shape, but his voice still sounds like a howl, until Silla manifests as well, and the northern wind personified basically literally takes the wind out of Jack’s sails. The blizzard around them settles, turning more into a heavy snowfall than anything else. “You would agree with him,” Notus’ voice is a whisper until she takes shape, and she looks irritated. At least one of them is on his side. “It _was_ rather mean, though,” Silla reminds, and he whacks Jack on the arm with the back of his hand, sending the winter spirit stumbling. Fei Lian catches him from falling off the ice shelf with a light gust as she appears at his side. “Fighting already, are we?”

“You know, I was kind of looking for a little _space_ ,” Jack says irritably, but without heat.

Vela is gone (at least, for the moment), and he hasn’t seen the few other friends he has in quite some time (though that might be more his fault than theirs). Right now, space is the last thing that Jack Frost wants. Which is what the wind deities no doubt realize, because they hardly spare him a glance before they’re back to their bickering. Or Notus and Tate, at the very least. Silla tries to interject, as he always does, and fails. And, as Fei Lian always does, she waits it out. “Honestly, Jack, I think you hurt your friends’ feelings,” Silla finally says.

“Yeah, well, she hurt my _feelings_ first,” the snow-bringing hisses bitterly. “You’d think that 200 plus years of friendship would come with a little honesty on the side. But, oh wait, turns out we weren’t actually friends at all—I was just another pawn for her and MIM to push back and forth between them along the board.”

All four of the wind deities have gone quiet, nothing but thick snowfall around them as they all turn to stare at their favorite companion.

“That isn’t who I was talking about, Jack, and you know it,” scolds the Inuit deity.

“The Guardians aren’t my friends!” Jack says immediately. “Friends care about each other; they don’t start petty fights over whose stupid holiday is better, or beat the stuffing out of you when something that happens on Easter Sunday isn’t your fault! And they sure as hell don’t dub you Bringer of _Death_!” The ice under him cracks sharply underfoot. For a second, his chest seizes in fear, and Notus takes his hand, gives it a squeeze to reassure him. She looks at him in worry, and he squeezes her hand back, trying to reassure _her_. “Friends take care of each other,” he says fiercely, because it was his friends who had patched him up after Easter of ’68, it’s his friends who comfort him when the nightmares have him waking up choking on a scream at night because not all the memories are _good_ ones.

Jack hadn’t had to defeat a damn Nightmare King to earn Tate’s friendship. The wind spirit had reached for _him_ that night, and the other wind-weavers had followed, most of them finding the frostling to be a good companion. Notus had, admittedly, thrown him around a bit when they’d first met. Now, though, Jack knew that she would do anything for him, and he for her.

Booted feat crunch in the snow behind him, and Tate, Notus, and Fei Lian disappear in a swirl of wind and snow, the blizzard kicking back up with enough ferocity to burry a town. Jack turns to face whoever has decided to intrude on his, admitted, sulk-fest. The Holly King stands tall and proud, undeterred by Jack’s tantrum-induced storm, so unlike the boy that the winter spirit once knew.

Hiccup Horrendous Haddock III has come a long way from the clumsy dragon trainer he was when Jack first met him. A dragon trainer who is, oddly enough, currently without said dragon.

“You know how hard it is for them to take human shape,” the winter sprite scolds, as he soothes the storm into something calmer.

“Funny, it looked like it came to them pretty easily from where I was standing,” the autumn spirit says casually, stuffing hands into the pockets of his winter coat as he steps forward. Or tries, in any case; his boot catches in the snow, and his arms windmill as he nearly face-plants then and there.

Okay, so maybe he hasn’t come _that_ long a ways.

Jack reaches out to catch him before he can hurt himself, a smile tilting the (oddly enough) older man’s lips. “You know,” Jack says, “when witches and wiccans talk about you, they make you sound so dignified—I wonder what they would think if they actually _met_ you. Thousands of young men and women, devastated.”

“Ha ha,” Hiccup says sarcastically, as Jack helps him right himself, and then he grins, tilting his head. “It’s been a while.”

The winter sprite takes a step or two away, giving them both some space. “It’s been, like, a year,” he corrects. It certainly isn’t the decade that he and Vela spent apart.

Not that he’s thinking of Vela.

“Yeah,” the Fall bringer agrees, “just before you became a Guardian, right?” he asks, pulling gloved hands from his pockets to twine behind his back, as he circles Jack. Someone may find it intimidating if the dork didn’t have to work so hard to pull his boot up and out of the thick layers of snow. “Normally we meet every Solstice, but it’s been a _year_ , Jack. You didn’t even stop by to help me paint the leaves.”

When the other man says nothing in return, Hiccup goes on, “You know, we never abandoned you when we made new friends.”

“They’re not my friends!” Jack shouts, once again, spinning away from the other sprite to walk to the edge of the ice shelf. He plops down there, and it is by literal sheer force of winter’s will that his little chunk of ice doesn’t break off and fall into the dark crevice below. His old friend makes for quite the show as he slides towards him, and then nearly right off the ice shelf. Jack reaches out and catches him, grip tight on the thick material of fur-lined trousers. He sighs, “I wish you would be more careful.”

“Don’t need to,” Hiccup says as he takes a seat next to him, “not when I’ve got you around to look after me.” He rocks to the side, bumps his shoulder into Jacks.

Jack goes, “Pfft,” but otherwise doesn’t say anything more, just bumps back.

“Plus, it helps when you’ve got a dragon tailing you twenty-four-seven,” he adds, leaning forward to peer into the dark crevice that separates them from another ice shelf. Glowing green eyes peer back at him from the dark, and Toothless trills at Jack in greeting, reminding him of Baby Tooth.

“I was wondering where you were,” the spirit says in return. The dragon climbs up out from the shadows—which brings forth some unwelcome memories—and settles at their backs, draping his tail over their laps.

Almost as if to trap Jack in place—he shoots a rather innocent-looking Hiccup a suspicious glance—but he still brushes his fingers over butter-soft scales. “Hey, buddy.”

“Anyway, about friends, or as you say, _colleagues_ —“

Jack shoots him a dirty look and says, “Just how long were you spying on us for?”

The wind deities make a point to hit Hiccup with a gust of air that sends him swaying, just to remind him that they’re still there.

“Long enough,” the Holly King says pointedly and shrugs.

“Long enough to hear what Vela told me? Or did you know about that before she bothered telling me?” The light snowfall kicks up into a storm again, and Jack pushes Toothless’ tail aside so that he can stand, using his staff to haul himself up.

Hiccup is careful now as he stands, using a firm grip on Toothless’ saddle to keep his balance on the slick ice. “No, but now that you mention it, what _did_ Vela tell you, Jack?”

“You’re telling me you really don’t know?”

“Vela was your friend long before she was mine, do you really think she would tell me anything that she didn’t tell you first?”

“I don’t know!” Jack admits, and he grabs at his hair and yanks. He turns away from Hiccup, and then turns back around to face him. “Vela was there the day I died,” he finally says, “apparently my sacrifice made me worthy of entrance to Valhalla.”

Hiccup looks at once pleased and upset. “Jack, that’s… _such_ an honor—“

“But MIM stopped her from taking me,” the ice elf interrupts quickly. “He told her that I had some great destiny to fulfill, and that once I had fulfilled it—once I had regained my memories of my former life—she was free to take me.”

The Viking is speechless, mouth gaping as he stares, wide-eyed, at his friend.

“So, yes, the Guardians are my _colleagues_ , because this is what I’ve been waiting for, Hic!” Jack chokes out with a laugh that sounds hysterical. “The other shoe has officially dropped! And it didn’t even happen the way I expected it to! I thought they would tire of me, or kick me out when they realized how useless I am! But instead it’s Vela; instead it’s one of the people I trusted the most!” He presses one hand over his face, just trying to breathe, feeling at the thick frost that clings to his skin in response to his distress. “And it makes me wonder,” he says, tearing his hand away, and flinging it out for no other reason than to emphasize what he’s feeling. Ice springs from the ground like stalagmite, sharp points cutting into the air. “Was it just a show, this entire time? Did she follow me, waiting for my death—did she befriend me because she wanted to know what was so special about my _‘destiny’_?” he spits, eyes stinging at the very idea.

Hiccup lunges for him, and Jack is so surprised that he brings his staff up in defense, unused to sudden movements or close contact after a year of self-induced isolation. But the staff just gets squished between them as his friend wraps him in a hug, and then he lets go of it all together so that he can return the gesture, because he’s definitely missed this. He’s missed all of the other seasons. “What’s the point of being their friend when I’m just going to be dead soon, anyway, Hic?”

The other man tugs away from him and marches towards Toothless, who looks skittish, no doubt picking up on their mood. “Hiccup?” Jack asks warily.

“Don’t bother asking—you know where I’m going,” the warrior says, lips pursed, pausing in his march to look back at his friend.

“Vela can only be found if she wants to be, Hiccup, and the only person she _wants_ to find her right now is me.” The frostling ducks his head, reaches up to dig his finger into his scalp. “Besides, even if you do find her…you would only be delaying the inevitable.”

“No!” the centuries-old sprite says fiercely. “Don’t you dare give up, Jack Frost! We don’t give up; we _fight_! Isn’t that what you’ve always told us?” He puts his foot in a stirrup, and swings his prosthetic over to lock into the other. “Be glad that the girls weren’t here to hear you spouting that—that _crap_. I’ll see you soon.”

He’s gone before Jack can even try to stop him, not that the winter spirit has the energy to do so. Instead, he lets the nearest wind deity sweep him up in a careful gust, and carry him towards the only home he’s ever known; an abandoned little shack near his lake in Burgess.

Unfortunately, he is completely unaware of the pacing figure that awaits him in the chilly forest that he calls home.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Tate is a Lakota wind god.  
> Silla (also known as Silap Inua) is the Inuit deity of the sky, the wind, and the weather. However, in this case, I'm only borrowing him to use as a wind spirit.  
> Notus is the Greek god of the south wind, but I made him into a girl.  
> Fei Lian is from the Chinese mythology, and is often interpreted as either male or female. She has a human form that goes by the name of Feng Bo, but I decided not to use it.
> 
> In this story, the four listed are only a few of many wind deities. But I selected them specifically to seek Jack out. The others are busy doing their jobs.
> 
> During the turn of the seasons, the Holly King and the Oak King battle for control. In spring and summer, the Oak King is dominant; while, in fall and winter, it is the Holly King who has control. No actual battles take place with Hiccup or anyone else. It's just a name that humans have given him and he just can't quite seem to shake.
> 
> As the story continues, you'll find that the characters have been forced to adopt quite a few unfortunate names.


	3. Chapter Three

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Bunny confronts Jack, but things don't go down the way he expected.

Jack knows that Bunnymund is there before the wind even sets him down on the forest floor.

He dusted the area with a fresh layer of snow earlier in the day, and the Easter Bunny isn’t noisy in his obvious pacing, but the tracks that he’s left in the snow tell a very clear story.

He looks angry as he marches back Jack’s way in the path that he’s set for himself, but the winter sprite’s sudden appearance brings him up short, and he pauses at the edge of the young-man’s vision. “Jack,” he says, and he doesn’t sound angry, but Bunnymund is always angry when Jack is in his general vicinity, so he knows better. “You don’t seem very surprised to see me,” the alien acknowledges, and the Guardian of Fun offers a shrug, as he throws his crook back to rest in the curve of his shoulder.

“I knew you were here,” he admits, as he makes his way towards his little hunting shack, which is—unfortunately—not too far off from here. He hopes that Bunnymund will (in his own words) “rack off” before they reach it, because he’s never been a fan of revealing where he lives to other spirits; particularly the ones who like to throw him around.

“How’s that?” the leporid asks curiously.

“I’ve been alive for over 300 years—thirty of those years were spent alone. Guy’s gotta eat, right? Rabbit was a favorite of mine,” he tells Bunny, quite unkindly, with a smile that’s more like a sneer than anything else. “When you’re on your own and your stomach feels like it’s eating itself out of hunger, you learn to adapt. Hunting became a handy skill.” A furred paw grips his arm and spins him around; he swivels on the ball of one foot, bringing his staff up for a strike with the hand that’s not currently immobilized. Bunnymund dodges the one-handed swing and leaps back, reaching for his boomerangs out of instinct. But then he seems to realize who he’s facing, and instead he holds his palms out in a gesture of peace.

“What’s goin’ on with you, Jack? I thought we’d gotten passed all this,” the spring Guardian says wearily, as he watches someone who’s meant to be his _comrade_ point a weapon at him that Bunny knows the winter sprite is _very_ capable of using.

(Jack wants to laugh in his face, feels a little hysterical about it all. Funny, he thinks, because I thought so too.)

“For a Guardian of Fun, you’re startin’ t’ sound awful bitter.”

“Oh, so it’s Jack now, is it?” The immortal demands angrily. “Funny, because last time we talked, I’m pretty sure I was Frostbite.” He gets right up in the lagomorph’s face, as long ears flatten.

“You’re not the first one to call me that, of course. I’m not even the first winter spirit to be called that. That’s the difference between all of us, right? Spring brings life, and Summer sustains it.” He huffs as he turns back around, moving a few steps away. “And that day in the Warren, you told me that there was a difference between fall and winter, because there was just something so beautiful about fall—you love to paint it, right? Because I’ve seen you paint it.” He sweeps one arm out to gesture around the forest. “But there’s _nothing_ beautiful about this, is there?” he asks, upset. Because he had always thought of winter as beautiful, and Hiccup and the others had never told him different. In fact, they _loved_ to play in the snow with him.

“Jack,” Bunnymund tries, but the other man barrels on, determined.

“There’s nothing beautiful about winter, because all it brings is death…” Jack looks at him. “You said that, too.” And somewhere down the line, he had started to _believe_ it. After all, isn’t that what he’d thought back at the party, when it was just him and Vela, standing in their own little world while surrounded by a sea of people.

( _If Jack has learned anything over the past 319 years, it’s that nothing goes together better than cold and death._ )

“That’s the difference between us; that’s where everybody got it all mixed up. Because, yeah, winter is cold and it is harsh, but we have never been cruel. Spring’s got that department covered all on it’s own.”

Bunny opens his mouth again, tries to speak, but once more Jack cuts him off. “You were right, you know, about _everything_. I was never meant to be a guardian, don’t know a thing about making kids happy, and all I do is bring death. And you were right about Vela, too.”

“What,” Aster whispers, as Jack turns again and starts heading deeper into the forest. “Jack wait, what do you mean about—Vela? The Valkyrie? Are you sayin’—“

“I mean just what I said. Tonight, she came to the party to take me to Valhalla,” he says without stopping, but the Easter Bunny jerks to a hault, before throwing himself forward to catch up with the sprite.

“We won’t let that happen, we’ll protect ya, keep ya here; you’re one of us, and we take care of our own,” the alien says adamantly.

Jack barks out a hysterical laugh. “Why? This is just what you want, isn’t it?”

“No!” Bunny shouts angrily, and he grabs for Jack again, blocking the staff that swings his way and pulls him in, trapping his arms at his sides. “Everythin’ I said that day, in the Warren—I was _wrong_ ; I was so wrong, Jack. Jus’ like I was wrong in ’68, and when ya were first chosen. Yer a _good_ person, Jack, and I-“ he pauses, grinding his teeth in frustration. Jack’s chest heaves, and he can feel it against his own.

“What?” Jack asks, all of his focus on the lagomorph, staff loose in his hand for once. He is so focused that he doesn’t even notice the flash of red in his peripheral, or the way a familiar arrow scrapes against the wall of its quiver as it’s drawn. He does, however, hear the strain of a bow as strings pull taught, hears the click of wood against wood as an arrow is nocked. And, judging by the way Aster tenses around him, tucking him in and close—

To protect me, Jack realizes, surprised. He’s trying to protect me.

—the warrior has heard it as well. Behind him stands one of the bravest people that winter has ever had the pleasure of meeting.

“You’ll be lettin’ ‘im go if ya know what’s good for ya,” Merida advises, looking as wild and fierce as the day Jack first met her.


	4. Chapter Four

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Merida spills the beans, Jack is done taking Bunnymund's shit, and someone finally decides that the winter sprite should be able to make his own decisions, even if it breaks their heart to admit it.

“Chill out, Warrior Princess,” Jack says with a genuine grin, oblivious to the bewildered look that takes over Bunnymund’s face as he peers down at his fellow guardian.

“Chill out,” Merida enunciates, “very funny, Old Man.”

The winter spirit presses away from Bunny, who reluctantly lets him approach the newcomer. Jack waves his hand and staff in front of him in a funny motion and goes, “Ooooh, name-calling already, huh? You just got here, and already you’re itching for a fight.” He steps in front of her target, reaches out and touches the tip of the arrow, pushing it down, down, down until she gets the picture and eases her string back into the sharp line it makes between the ends of her bow. She pulls the arrow back and drops it into her quiver.

“Can ya blame me? Hic’ pops up at me castle, says Vela’s gone off her rocker, tells me to keep an eye on ya, then I get here, and the hare’s got ya trapped—“

“I didn’t have ‘im trapped!” Bunnymund says angrily. “And I’m a _bunny_. The Easter Bunny, as a matter o’ fact.”

“I know _damn well_ who ya are!” the summer sprite snarls, and Jack has to catch her at the shoulders to stop her from _launching_ herself at the Guardian of Hope.

“Mer’,” he begs, giving her arms a squeeze. She looks up at his pleading face and huffs, shrugging him off.

“Where’ve ya been, anyway?” the princess demands. “It’s been a year, Jack. Where the hell have ya been? Too busy with yer new masters to take some time off for yer friends?”

The sprite shoves both hands in his hair, grips and tugs furiously. “I’ve been…busy,” he says unconvincingly.

Bunnymund snorts and earns himself a scathing glare. “Trust me, sheila,” he tells Merida, paying Jack’s look no mind. “We haven’t seen much more of ‘im than you ‘ave.”

At least, not that Jack's aware of.

Jack looks between them, glare furious. “I’m going home!” he says angrily, and starts marching again. “You can both go…suck on an egg.” He chokes at the end of his sentence, turns to Bunny, who looks upset. “I didn’t mean that!” he says quickly. “I swear, I didn’t mean that! I’m not—“

I’m not _him_ , he wants to say, but his throat hurts when he tries to get the words out.

“I believe you,” Bunny says quietly, but it doesn’t ease the heaviness in Jack’s chest.

Because even though they haven’t seen Pitch since last year, Jack feels like he’s still right there, whispering at him from the shadows.

_You make a mess of everything._

And I do, Jack thinks. He had made a mess last year, and he was still making a mess, even now.

Merida huffs and puffs and complains on their way to his cabin, and he determinedly ignores her, rolling his eyes, until she smacks him upside the head. “And don’t go rollin’ yer eyes at me, Jack Frost. I’ve been tellin’ ya t’ get a decent place to live since we first met, and all ya’ve done is ignore me. Yer like a damn mermaid, fillin’ that bloody shack up with stupid trinkets and lettin’ ‘em sit there,” she rants. “And look at this,” she tugs at his clothes, “ya look like a bloody homeless person. We ‘aven’t been givin’ ya nice clothes just so ya can go around wearin’ this crap.”

“Excuse you!” Jack says indignantly. “What I’m wearing is just fine!”

“She’s got a point, Frost—flake,” Bunny quickly corrects, looking a bit awkward, especially at the look that Merida shoots him.

“This is the worst day of my life,” the winter spirit mumbles to himself. The two most temperamental people he knows, teaming up together to judge his clothing choices. “How did I end up here?” he wonders to himself.

“Be glad yer here at all!” Merida reprimands. “Odin knows that MIM could’ve just left you at the bottom of that lake, all dead and surrounded by darkness.” She throws an arm around Jack’s shoulders, probably to reassure herself, but he’s gone still and tense, and it makes the Scottish princess jerk back when she refuses to let go.

Bunnymund is a few paces behind them, but Jack doesn’t dare turn to look at him. He does however hear the quiet but harsh “ _What_?” that issues from the alien’s maw.

Because Jack hasn’t said anything. He hasn’t mentioned his death or the circumstances leading up to it to the other guardians. He only mentioned it to the Holly King and the Summer Fae, and now she’s gone and unintentionally told on him.

“What?” Merida copies, turning to look between the two of them. She’s quiet for a few seconds, and then she says, “Oh, Jack—have ya told them _anythin’_?”

He glares at her and says, “No! Why would I do that when I have you here to do it for me?” He clenches his fists, and the ice that has formed over his skin cracks sharply and falls away in flakes. He starts marching for his cabin once more, footsteps thumping and angry against the forest floor. “You both need to leave—now!”

“I don’t think so, frostbite,” Bunny says angrily, and he’s suddenly at Jack’s side again, padded fingers curling around his bicep. “I got some questions, and ya owe me answers.”

But the sprite isn’t taking it this time. “I don’t owe you anything!” He spins his staff in hand, knocks Bunnymund’s hand away, and brings his crook back and then forward, catching the lagomorph just under the ribs. It barely sends him stumbling, but it gets Jack out of arms reach, and the snow bringer swings his hand out to the side, fingers curled, and then shoves back towards his fellow guardian. Ice forms along the ground at his motion, and rushes at the keeper of hope in sharp spikes, but it doesn’t cut into his thin skin, simply forming around him to keep him in place. He yanks a boomerang from his bandolier and starts hacking at ice, all while glaring at the winter spirit. “Jack!” he shouts, but the man in question is already hurrying away.

“Jack!” Merida darts past the trapped Easter Bunny, but doesn’t make it much farther than he did, as a wall of ice forms in front of her, stretching from one tree to another. It starts to melt as soon as she lays her hands on it, but it is thick, so instead she runs to the closest tree, and swings around it. Her friend, however, is nowhere in sight and when she calls for Tate, the wind deity does not answer her call. She could get there by foot rather easily; she knows the way to Jack’s pathetic excuse for a house, but there’s something she has to take care of first.

She rounds on the idiot still hacking away at ice. The heat rolls off her in waves as she steps towards him. “ _You_ ,” she hisses angrily.

The Pookan warrior hasn’t even gotten his other arm free, but he meets her gaze without fear, readying himself for whatever she has in store for him.

About a mile away, Jack stumbles into his cabin, slamming the door shut so hard that the trinkets on his shelves rattle and some of the books tip over and slide right off, thumping as they hit the floor.

Tate and Notus whisper comfort in his ear, though the latter should not be here right now, as he hangs his crook up on a nail in the wall. But all he can do is pace back and forth between his bed and writing desk, shoving hard at the chair that he usually sits in while he writes. It hits the floor with a clatter that brings him absolutely no satisfaction, and all he can do is continue his pacing, clenching and unclenching his fists. The ice on his hands cracks and falls away as he curls his fingers, thicker now than before, but he can still feel it crawling up his arms and shoulders, like a parody of armor.

He paces until he feels light-headed, and then finally has to make himself sit down, bracing his elbows on his knees as he drops his face into his hands. His chest heaves as he sobs, eyes squeezed shut tightly as his tears freeze along his lashes. A firm pressure brushes along the back of his head, smoothing down his hair, and he figures it’s Tate or Notus, right up until he hears a curious trill and a soft sigh.

“Oh, Sweet Tooth.”

He throws himself from his bed and yelps, startled, then immediately starts scrubbing at his eyelashes to get rid of the ice that has formed around them, making them stick together. Queen Toothiana’s figure is blurry at first when he finally pries his lids open, but it clears up after he blinks a few times. She stands up, and he takes a few hurried steps back, nearly tripping over the chair that he’d thrown in his haste to create some distance between them.

Tooth looks at him sadly, wings drooping at her back, and she settles back down on the edge of the bed. “I’m sorry, Jack,” she tells him, rubbing her arm awkwardly, “I didn’t mean to startle you.”

“What are you doing here?” he demands, not bothering with platitudes. “How did you even find this place?”

The faerie looks sheepish as she smooths a hand over the feathers along her arm. “I’m…not at liberty to say.”

Unimpressed, Jack says, “Sandy told you, didn’t he?” and Tooth flushes. Because Sanderson Mansnoozie was the only one of the guardians that he had invited into his little shack. Just a week earlier, he and the dream weaver had stolen a jug of egg-nog—the good stuff—from the kitchen of Santoff Clausen, barely avoiding the Yeti who worked in the kitchen (Ivan!), as he charged after them, swinging a spatula as they kept high up, close to the rafters and just out of reach, giggling as they went. After they’d gotten away from the enraged cook, Jack had brought Sandy back to the cabin, and they had finished the entire jug within the hour. Suffice it to say that the night had been one full of creative dreams and unexpected snow fall.

For days afterwards, even through the hangover, Jack had felt warm every time he looked back at the memories—and that was quite a feat for a winter spirit. That day, he’d given Sandy’s invitation a chance, and the Sandman had made him feel like he was finally settling in with the guardians, no matter what Bunnymund had to say. In fact, one of the reasons that Jack had showed up at North’s party was because Sandy had promised that he’d be there.

And then Vela had shown up.

In front of him, Baby Tooth hovers a short distance away from his face, wings fluttering so quickly that they’re nothing but a blur of motion at her back. She gives a worried trill, and reaches out with one tiny hand to pat his cheek, before moving down to settle delicately in the crook of his neck, her tiny feathers tickling Jack’s skin. He huffs and smiles a little, reaching up with one careful finger to gently stroke the feathers along her forehead. The gesture makes her coo as she presses into it, despite how cool his skin is.

Across from them, her queen watches on with a soft expression. “You’re so good with her, and she loves you _so much_. None of the others have ever taken to anyone like this before,” she admits quietly. “You know, in the beginning, I only saw my faeries as helpers; little creations to help me with my job as the population grew. But after pitch…” She pulls her bottom lip between perfect teeth and frowns, staring intently at the colourful little clone that had perched herself on Jack’s shoulder. “I realized that they’ve become so much more than that to me.” She stands up again, but Jack doesn’t flinch back this time when she approaches him or when she reaches out to touch Baby Tooth, who seems content to just snuggle into Old Man Winter’s shoulder.

“Something they don’t tell you when you become a guardian; when you start looking after children and protecting them, is that—in doing so—you’re giving up your chance to have a child of your own. Because how can you bring a child into this world—your world, when you spend so much time trying to keep others safe. When you take this job, you paint a target on your back, and any potential children you may have are just seen as collateral damage,” she tells him bitterly, her hand retracting. She turns around, flits to the other side of the room, and then turns around again. Tooth is a lot like Jack is, or so he’s noticed. She has such a hard time staying still. “When we first met you; when I saw you for the first time, I thought I was in love.”

This doesn’t surprise Jack. It wasn’t like he hadn’t seen the way she reacted to him, noticed the blushes and the nervousness. He’d watched the way she fumbled over herself when she was around him, and he’d pointedly ignored it, which perhaps was rather cruel on his part, but he hadn’t returned her feelings. The only thing he felt for the Tooth Fairy was a sense of comradery, a potential for friendship. But he doesn’t say any of this, he just listens.

Tooth says, “I was wrong, though, because I’m not in love with you, Jack. But I do _love you_ , the same way I love Sandy and Aster.” She doesn’t mention North, but he knows exactly why. After all, there have been more than one unfortunate incident where he’s walked in on the two in the middle of some particularly heated make-out sessions. It was kind of traumatizing. “Patching you up after the battle with Pitch, fighting back to back with you in the battles that we’ve taken on within the last year—it’s made me realize that all I’ve wanted for you is to be happy and protected. Because what mother wouldn’t want that for her son? And that’s how I see you, Jack. I am _so_ grateful for the day you were chosen as a Guardian, even if you aren’t, because it’s like MIM gave me something I thought I’d never have.”

She is in tears, now, and Jack has to swallow the lump that has formed in his throat.

“How can you say that?” the winter sprite croaks. “How can you say that when we hardly even know each other?”

Tooth has made her way closer, so that she stands in front of him now, and she takes one of his ice cold hands in her own, which are tiny and delicate, and she squeezes them tight. “Because as determined as you’ve been to avoid us Jack, we have been just as determined to watch over you and keep you safe. Because that’s what family does, they look out for each other, and they love each other unconditionally.”

“What if I don’t know how to love unconditionally?” he asks her, voice cracking like the ice on his arms and shoulders.

“Then we’ll show you,” she tells him firmly.

He scrubs at his watering eyes before they can ice over, and his voice shakes as he quietly admits, “Tooth, I don’t know what to do. Vela wants to take me away to Valhalla, to give me _peace_ , and there’s a part of me that wants to go, but there’s another part of me that wants to stay. How am I supposed to choose?”

Queen Toothiana shakes her head sadly. “That’s not a decision that I can make for you, Jack. But know that, whatever choice you make, it is yours, and you have earned it; your place as a guardian, your peace is Valhalla. You deserve to be happy,” she says, reminding him of Vela’s words at the party. “And I will back up whatever you decide, because I love you, just like the rest of the guardians.”

Jack is the one to initiate the hug this time, wrapping Toothiana’s petite form in a fierce hug; one that she returns with just as much enthusiasm, wings fluttering happily behind her. Baby Tooth is forgotten for the moment, right up until Jack feels her clinging to his neck, one of her tiny palms settling over his artery.

“I-” he cuts himself off, and then admits, “Tooth, you'd make the best mom.”

Her arms, around his waist, squeeze tighter, and he can feel tears run along his collarbone, no doubt darkening his sweater as she tucks her face into his neck.

He lays his head along the top of hers, feathers soft against his face, and thinks about what she said.

“Because I love you, _just like the rest of the guardians_.”

If only that were true.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Oh, I'm sorry, were you expecting some warm fuzzies? Because I apparently decided that this story would be better off with some ANGST AND ANGER AND DOUBLE THE PAIN.


	5. Chapter Five

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Aster and Merida have a show down of the physical sort, and then Hiccup pops up and the three of them have a show down of the verbal sort. Meanwhile, back at the cabin, Tooth admires Jack's collection of stuff, and the Winter King asks the Warrior Queen for a favour.

“Oh no, Mate, you gotta go,” E. Aster Bunnymund had insisted, as he shoved Jack Frost towards the nearest tunnel. “In fact, how’d you even get in here? No, ya know what, never mind; ya need to leave.”

Jack had looked at him in surprise, but his expression quickly turned into one of petulance and pleading. “Aw, c’mon, Bunny. It’s only a _week_ until Easter, don’t you want some help painting eggs and getting things ready?”

Aster remembered shaking his head, not the least bit deterred by the Winter sprite’s pout. “I’ve been doin’ this fer _centuries_ , I think I’ve got it covered by now,” the lagomorph had said firmly, tilted his head to give the younger man a pointed look.

“But last-“ Jack had stopped himself then, and his skin had turned almost the same shade as his hair when he’d caught himself in what he was about to say. “Well, okay, you’ve got things covered. But at least let me paint one egg? I mean, I’ve never painted anything other than leaves before. Please?” he’d asked, then he had ducked his head low and tilted his face up to stare into the Easter Bunny’s forbidding, scowl-twisted face with a look of genuine sincerity.

The honest interest had caught Aster off guard. Usually when Jack popped up in the Warren, what followed was a whirlwind of mischief and chaos that took days to clean up. Normally, he didn’t mind so much, especially since it had been nearly a year since the new Guardian’s induction, and Aster had only just started to see the Joy bringer on a regular basis over the last couple of weeks. It being so close to Easter, though, set the alien on edge. But the Pooka had felt that little spark of Hope in the young-man—for the first time since they had defeated Pitch—and before he’d known what he was doing, he’d already handed over one of his brushes and a freshly-sprouted googie.

“Alright now, try an’ start with somethin’ simple, ‘kay? And be careful of the way ya hold yer googie; too tight and ya might crack the little guy’s shell,” he had explained, as he’d sat side-by-side with Jack. “Now, what colour would ya like t’ start off with? Lemme guess,” he’d said with a roll of his eyes, “blue and white.”

The sprite had frowned. “Actually,” he’d said, “do you have any gold?”

Aster had blinked in surprise, but had obliged none-the-less. He searched through the dozens of paint pots set out in front of him, before finally finding gold, which he’d passed over to Jack, who’d accepted with a pleased smile.

“Thanks, Bunny,” Aster recalled the younger man saying with a bright smile, and his mouth had tilted in a grin of his own.

At about the one hour mark, Jack had still been diligently working on his egg, having confiscated several other colours while he went. Aster, meanwhile, had painted up and set loose at least six dozen eggs. All of which were gathered and showing off to each other. Bunny was, admittedly, curious about Jack’s own egg, but the little larrikin had turned slightly away to hide it from view when the elder guardian had tried to sneak a peek, insisting that it was a surprise.

When he looks back on it later—when it’s two weeks in (after two months of regular visits), and he finds himself turning his head at every breeze and tamping down disappointment when the little frostling doesn’t pop up at the monthly meeting, Aster will stop being angry with Jack and be a lot more angry with himself. Because there was plenty he could’ve done to stop what happened next. He could’ve given a warning; could’ve taken the time to guide his fellow guardian through things; could’ve been more _patient_.

But instead he’d done what he’s always done; he’d let his temper get the better of him.

-

“This is _your fault_!”

Aster barely fends off the ball of fire, pulling up his ice-encased arm just in time. The heat melts straight through the ice, singeing his fur, and what’s left of it falls off in chunks, but his feet are still stuck to the ground; all he can do is throw one of his ‘rangs in a desperate attempt to bid time as he continues to hack at the ice around his legs with his other. The sprite had had an arrow nocked, but his weapon connects solidly with her bow, sending it flying, before circling around back to him. He catches it and slips it into his bandolier as his opponent draw the sword from its sheath at her belt, stepping forward with a very determined expression on her face.

He doesn’t let her get far, feeling his chest warm as he calls on the forest around them. The earth and plants are tired, just waking up from the long winter, but they respond to him willingly enough. Roots untangle themselves from the earth, curling around the girl’s legs, and vines that definitely aren’t native to such a dry climate sprouting from the ground to catch her arms, pull her back to give Bunny some time. He holsters his second ‘rang and focuses his power into his paws, pressing them into the remaining ice that has him sticking to the ground, urging it to melt. The Pooka may not be Olwen herself, but he’d brought light and life to this damn rock, he’d brought hope, and spring was his niche. Sure, he’d spent the last several centuries wallowing in his Warren and painting patterns on eggs, but that didn’t make him defenseless.

Still, it surprises him when the summer sprite simply burns her way through the plants that ensnare her. Sprites of her kind weren’t usually so easy-going about destroying what spring brought forth. Watching her carefully and he reaches one hand up for his preferred weapon, he readying himself as she approaches, fire dancing over her fingertips as it takes shape as a ball, just as the others before it. “Here,” she sneers, “let me give ya a bit o’ help with tha’.”

They launch their respective weapons at the same time, and Merida brings her sword up and around to deflect the boomerang, but Aster has nothing to defend himself with. The thick ice that had once coated his arm was gone, and his feet are still stuck firmly to the earth, despite his best efforts. All he can do is stand and wait, watching as the flames fly towards him.

Then, to his complete and utter astonishment, a bloody _dragon_ drops from the sky above and curls around him. The fire catches along the dark scales of his back, rolling right off and turning into a harmless puff of smoke as the flame peters out. A shadow blocks out light from above, and a figure lands beside the ancient beast. His appearance is average enough—or modern, more the like—with the exception of the _wings_ and the damn _fin_ that sticks out of his back. He glances at Aster, takes in the singed fur on his arm, the ice coating his feet, and makes a gesture to the Night Fury, who carefully melts away the rest of the ice with a steamy breath.

Bunny can’t even feel his feet, but there’s no sign of frostbite, and he knows the feeling will return as he moves around and warms up.

Across the clearing, the fire-starter lets out a howl of fury, looking every bit the child throwing a tantrum. She sheaths her sword with practiced ease, but stomps up to the newcomer, blue eyes flashing in anger. “What in the seven hells do ya think yer doin’, Hiccup?”

“Jee, I don’t know, Mer’—maybe keeping you from losing one of your oldest friends because you couldn’t keep your temper in check?” suggested the man that Merida called “Hiccup.”

Aster had heard Jack mention someone named Hiccup perhaps twice in the time that he’d known him, but he never would’ve imagined that the Guardian of Fun was talking about the Holly King, though it made sense. Admittedly, he had assumed that none of the other sprites came around Jack (something he’d chalked up to the man’s trouble-making ways, he now admits to himself guiltily), but the idea seems silly now. Especially considering that the younger man was a seasonal; of course he kept in contact with his three counterparts. They had to communicate with each other in order to maintain the balance.

And if this was the Holly King, then that meant that the fiery warrior who had been about to burn a hole in the Easter Bunny was none other than Summer herself.

“As if we haven’t lost him already!” the seasonal spirit says angrily, throwing her arms out. “We should’ve put a stop t’ this guardian shite when Jack first told us about it! At least then he would be where he belonged; with us; with his _family_!”

“He is with his family!” Bunny finally says, just as angry.

Merida’s face twists up in a mocking sneer. “Family? Yeah right! Even you admitted that ya’d barely seen Jack this year! And look what ya did just now—ya drove him off, set him runnin’! You and the rest o’ the guardians, you’re not Jack’s family. Yer just another part o’ the _job_.”

“Merida,” Hiccup says tiredly, running a hand over his face. It doesn’t give Aster the chance to spit back the acidic reply that he really wants to. “We don’t have the time for this. I get it; you know I do, but right now, there are other things we need to do.” The look on his face is pleading, and Merida caves, just as she always has.

“Ya didn’t find Vela,” she says.

“The only one she wants to see right now is Jack, so he’s the only one who’ll be able to track her down,” the Holly King admits, simple confirming to himself what Jack had told him earlier, before he and Toothless had flown off in a rage.

(He can just hear the “I told you so” from here.)

“Then we’d best get t’ Jack before he goes lookin’ fer her.”

Hiccup narrows his eyes at his fellow seasonal. “Speaking of which, where is our little frostling? Because I’m pretty sure the whole reason I sent you his way was so that you could keep an eye on him and make sure that he and Vela didn’t cross paths.”

“I _was_ keepin’ an eye on ‘im, right up until this idiot decided that man-handlin’ Jackie would be the best way t’ get some answers.” She gestures to Aster, and her expression darkens. “In fact, he had our boy pinned when I showed up—not that he was puttin’ up much of a fight.”

Toothless’ chest rumbles with a growl, teeth popping into place and suddenly Aster is at the end of his glare, rather than Merida. The smooth-scaled beast backs up to his rider’s side, as the man’s face hardens. He too is looking at Aster now, and his expression makes the Pooka tense. “Obviously some things never change.”

“An’ just what the hell is that s’pposed t’ mean?” the Easter Bunny demands, ears pressing back against his skull at the implication. He didn’t just toss Jack around for kicks! He hadn’t even been trying to hurt the Guardian of Fun; he’d just wanted to _talk_.

The Holly King shakes his head, moving forward with his dragon slinking low and narrow-eyed at his side. He pauses next to Bunny and says, “Just know this, Space-Rabbit: If Jack Frost comes limping our way again over a misunderstanding on your stupid holiday, it won’t matter how old you are, where you’re from, or the things you’ve done in your time—I will do whatever it takes to end your existence, and then I’ll make Winter a nice new coat out of your pelt.”

“A _misunderstanding_? You have no idea what your talkin’ about, mate,” says Aster, fuming at the mention of ’68.

“No, _you_ have no idea!” the younger man tells him angrily. “Maybe if any of you _Guardians_ pulled your heads out of your asses and came out of your fortresses every once in a while, you’d have some inclination towards what really goes on out here, in the _real world_!” He swings his arms out around him in a gesture that reminds Aster an awful lot of Jack, indicating to not just the forest, but to the world in general, the warrior imagines. “And not just around whatever deities you deem worth your time!”

He and Hiccup are glaring at each other, but the alien can’t help but think back to something the winter sprite said along the same lines before he became a guardian. In a much calmer tone, he asks, “Did Jack really die?”

The look on Autumn’s face is one of surprise and then his eyes narrow, and he shoots a look at his Summer counterpart, who is conveniently preoccupied with looking at what is apparently a very interesting coniferous tree. He puffs up his cheeks and then expels a breath as he turns back to Bunny. “That…is not a question that you should be asking me.”

The Keeper of Light lets out a breath of his own, wanting to object, but knowing that the seasonal is right. “Alright,” he acquiesces. “We all want our answers, don’t we?” The pair give him a nod and a grumble of ascent. “Then I s’ppose we’d best get to Jack before he decides to go to the Valkyrie.”

“C’mon!” Merida says, eager now, and she takes the lead, heading straight for the snow elf’s cottage.

In said cottage, the Faerie Queen and the King of Winter sit side-by-side on a small bed just big enough for the latter, sides pressed together, as the former gazes around the single-room cabin, taking in all the little trinkets and treasures that Jack has collected over his 300 plus years lifetime.

“This is amazing,” Tooth admits, and she grins when her gaze catches on a shelf that is lined with the little replicas of long-dead dinosaurs that Baby Tooth is playing with, touching and moving around. The tiny faerie pushes a mean looking one with sharp teeth towards another with a long neck and squeaks something about betrayal.

Jack chuckles at his little friend, and it warms the Tooth Fairy’s chest to hear such a genuine sound from a man that she considers family. She tells him, “When you return, you should show me around more, tell me about all the stories behind them.”

The winter sprite looks at her intently for a moment and says, “If I don’t come back, it’s all yours.

“And Jamie’s and Soph’s,” he hastens to add.

Toothiana looks at him and feels unbearably sad.

“There’s something in the top drawer of my writing desk, there.” He gestures to the only drawer with a lock on it. “B.T. knows where the key is. If I don’t come back, she’ll give it to you.” He takes in a breath. “There’s a list in there that’ll tell you what goes to who. And there’s a journal! And I want you to read it.”

“Jack,” she says unsurely, not entirely comfortable with the idea of delving into her friend’s personal thoughts. His cold hands take hold of hers, the same way she had earlier.

“I need you to do this. All of you deserve to know,” he says firmly.

Her shoulders rise and then droop, confusion twisting her features. “Know what?”

“You’ll find out—whether I come back or not, I promise you’ll find out,” he says as he stands, letting go of her hands as he moves.

“You’re going to her now?” She stands quickly, watching as he snatches up his crook from the hook on the wall.

He asks, “To Vela?” before shaking his head. “There are a couple of people I need to see before I face her.” He heads for the door, but then pauses when he reaches it. “One more thing,” he amends, though he doesn’t turn to face Tooth, far too embarrassed by the request he’s about to make. “In the drawer, beside the journal, there’s something there that I need you to give to Bunnymund, okay?”

The Warrior Queen’s face scrunches in confusion. “What-?”

“You’ll know it when you see it,” he tells her quickly, before opening the door and stepping outside, shutting it firmly behind him. Tate and Notus wrap around him, apparently determined to stick this thing out with him. “C’mon, guys, let’s go see Jamie.”

-

“Look at what ya’ve done!” Jack remembers Aster shouting at him, as he’d swept a furred arm out to gesture to toppled over pots of paint, stiffened up and frozen over from when the Guardian of Fun had panicked. The tree they’d been sitting under was in pieces, splintered scattered, pieces of bark floating down the colour river, leaves stained by the paints that had spilled over onto the grass.

“I’m sorry!” Jack had choked out, completely horrified by the mess he’d made.

Things had just escalated so quickly. He’d been trying to save the paint, but he’d lost control, and his ice had spread to the nearest trees, frozen them to the point that the trunks had exploded outward, and caused an even greater mess than before.

“D’ ya have any idea how long it takes t’ make those paints?” Aster had hollered furiously. “An' don't even get me started on my trees!” His expression had been venomous as he'd pointed to the pair of willows. “An’ now ya’ve gone and ruined 'em—just like ya ruin everything else! Good on ya, Frostbite!” The nickname that he usually reserved for playful quips and teasing had been anything but affectionate, and Jack flinched away from it, not that Bunnymund had noticed; not that he ever noticed.

“Why couldn’t ya have been Spring or Summer, or even Autumn! At least Autumn has beauty t’ it! But no, ya had t’ be Winter! And all Winter does is bring along destruction and _death_!” the Pooka had hissed, eyes narrowed and ears flat.

His chest had been heaving at the finish of his rant, and he’d glared at Jack, who’d stared back with wide-eyes, his heart a painful ache in his thin chest.

After a moment, Aster’s own eyes had gone wide, as his own words had seemed to finally register in his head. Quietly, he’d said, “Jack,” but stopped to catch the paint brush that the little snow elf had tossed his way. “Jack!” he’d yelled, because when he’d looked up from the tool, the Guardian of Fun had already launched himself into the air, zooming towards whatever tunnel he’d used to enter the warren.

In one hand, he had a white-knuckled grip on his staff; in the other, he cradled a colourful little egg.


	6. Chapter Six

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Tooth gets a little ahead of herself and ends up regretting it, then exacts a little revenge along the way. Bunnymund receives some encouragement from an unexpected source.

Tooth, admittedly, gets a little ahead of herself.

Okay, she gets way ahead of herself and demands that the sassiest of her girls fork over the key that Jack had told her about. Her little tooth fairy is obstinate, refusing at first. “Jack only said you could have it if he doesn’t come back,” she insists.

“But he said that either way, he would give me my answers, right? Does the _when_ truly matter?” she asks, eyes pleading. The little tooth-collector hesitates for a second, teetering on the edge of her surety.

“Please, Baby,” the warrior—no, mother—requests. It clearly convinces her, because B.T. flutters down to the floorboards and leans over to settle her tiny hand on one board in particular. And Toothiana can see now, the little groove where one might tuck a finger inside. With hands as small as hers, she manages to fit two fingers in the little nook, and she pulls up, revealing the secret compartment for what it really is.

It’s much larger than she expects, and she shoves the top to the side so that she can see clearer. The key is there, just as promised, but that’s not all that is in Jack’s little hide-away compartment; next to the key is a row of books.

Tooth picks up the first in line and opens it, oblivious to the furious trilling of her daughter, and begins to read.

_Darkness. That’s the first thing I remember. It was dark, it was cold, and I was scared. But then I saw the moon. It was so big, and it was so bright. It seemed to chase the darkness away. And when it did, I wasn’t scared anymore. Why I was there and what I was meant to do, that I’ve never known, and part of me wonders if I ever will._

_My name is Jack Frost. How do I know that? The moon told me so. But that was all he ever told me._

“It’s a journal,” she realizes and then peers over the top of the book in her hand, falling apart as it is, to look at the row that is still neatly lined up in the compartment. “They’re _all_ journals.” In this run-down little shack, tucked beneath dusty floorboards, between a creaky bed and an antique desk lies page upon page of Jack’s history. His entire life, carefully written down in his own neat hand-writing. Every journal is different; the one in her hands is a mangled thing, with yellowed pages and binding that looks like it was stitched together by hand. The cover does not stick to it, and on the inside of it, someone else’s name is scrawled across in cursive, declaring ownership. But there are pages missing, and the state of the book suggest that it was not well taken care of by its previous owner. Perhaps they threw it away—or perhaps Jack stole it.

Toothiana doesn’t care either way, too eager to take in the words on the page to contemplate how they got there. She reads as much as she can at first, but eventually resorts to skimming as she loses her patience. It’s when she comes across one statement in particular that she finally listens to her daughter and puts the journal away.

 _I killed someone today_.

She snaps the book closed and slots it back into place next to the others, even though the words have seared themselves into the back of her eyelids, along with the uneven and wavering letters. She can imagine Jack’s hand shaking as he writes, and it hurts to think about. Some things are meant to stay private. So she tries to think about something else; like the fact that the entry is dated only two months after the first one that he’d written. The same entry where he’d spoken of the only encounter he’d ever had with MIM.

_My name is Jack Frost. How do I know that? The moon told me so. But that was all he ever told me._

She recalls the expression of bitterness and amazement that had overtaken his face at Santoff Clausen, when they’d told him that Manny had chosen him as the newest guardian.

 _“He_ talks _to you?”_

Things are certainly starting to come together, the Tooth Fairy thinks to herself, as she swipes up the key from the compartment, before replacing the cover. B.T. is looking up at her with an expression that shrieks of disapproval, and the queen quickly looks away as she rises from her crouched position to approach the desk.

The top drawer unlocks easily enough, and to the left is the list, just as Jack promised, and to the right is Aster’s gift (which she recognizes on sight, just as promised), and in the middle is another journal. This one is just a plain college-ruled composition book, though it’s thicker than most. Toothiana doesn’t start at the beginning; she jumps right to the end, hoping to find out more about the situation with Vela. But Jack hasn’t written anything about the Valkyrie, not recently. However, he has been writing about someone else.

The Warrior Queen was expecting the anger, she was prepared for the rage.

But she couldn’t have predicted who she’d be pointing her sword at by the end of the day.

Hiccup knows that Jack has been having more and more trouble with his powers lately, but he gets the feeling that this out-of-season blizzard has less to do with a loss of control and more to do with keeping them away. The snow is coming down in heaps, huge flakes that catch on his eyelashes, and sizzle as they touch Merida’s skin. The trio can’t see more than three feet ahead, but that doesn’t stop them from making it to the cabin.

The door swings open without any trouble, and Berk’s former chief is the first to step inside, shaking clumps of snow from his jacket and pants, and dusting off his wet hair before he finally looks up at the figure standing at Jack’s rickety desk. It’s just not the person he was expecting to find.

“Hiccup,” Queen Toothiana says in surprise, small hands gripping a familiar journal.

“Tooth,” he says back, nervous about what it could mean that she’d even been able to get her hands on it in the first place. Behind him, two more people enter, and Hiccup is alarmed to see the fire that enters the memory-keeper’s eyes when they land on her fellow guardian. She drops the book back into the drawer where she’d found it and lunges for the nearest weapon (kept in a tube that also holds umbrellas, a cane, a long bow with arrows to go along, and what looks to be a pair of arnis fighting sticks); an old scimitar that the Holly King knows Jack stole off a thief in the Arabian desert. Tooth shouts a war cry just before she lunges at Bunnymund, her movements precise and practiced as she attacks someone who is meant to be an ally.

“What the hell, Tooth?” the Pooka yells. It is only his carefully honed reflexes that keep him from being gutted. The Tooth Fairy drives him back out into the blizzard before he’s even had a chance to shake off the snow that had already stuck itself to his fur.

“Oh!” Toothiana is shouting above the howl of the winds, above the sound of weapon against weapon as Aster deflects the blade using one of her boomerangs with some difficulty. It’s times like these that he wishes he’d stuck with his staff. “I’m sorry!” Her voice is loud and shrill, like that of a bird’s trill in the early morning in spring. It makes his ears hurt. “Am I being too _destructive_ for you? Or maybe it’s the prospect of _death_ that has you running! It must be all of this _winter weather_ getting to me!” she yells hoarsely, and the Easter Bunny is so surprised that he falters in his dodge, earning a nasty cut across the cheek for his fumble. Before he knows what’s happening, she’s knocked the ‘rang from his hand and backed him up against a tree, the tip of her blade level with his throat. Her perfect teeth are bared at him in a snarl that he’s only ever seen directed at enemies before, and her chest is heaving with harsh breaths that come out in puffs of warm mist between clenched teeth. “I stood at your side last night, just like I always have, and I threatened someone that Jack loved because I didn’t know any better!”

“Tooth-“

“But maybe I would have if you had—for _once in your life_ —kept your damn temper in check!” She swipes the scimitar through the air, barely inches from his neck, but then lets it hang at her side, because she doesn’t need a weapon when she has words. “We were getting closer; he was warming up to us! If you had just had some patience, he would be here, Aster! He wouldn’t have given that bitch’s offer a single thought!” Behind her, the two other seasonals stand as the storm calms around them, and Merida steps forward.

“What d’ ya mean he _would_ be here?” she asks, blue eyes narrowing.

Toothiana whips around to face the summer and autumn sprites, as if only just remembering that they were there. She lets out a deflating breath and heads once more into the cabin. “Jack is already gone,” she says stiffly as she passes the pair by.

Merida reaches for the other Queen, and Tooth must see it, because she raises the sword, and then Hiccup is between them, nearly tripping over himself to stop what promises to be a truly destructive fight before it can begin. “You know, I’m getting kind of tired playing mediator, guys,” the Viking informs them wearily. He’s got a wrist in each hand until both women shake him off.

“Where’d he go?” It’s Bunnymund who asks.

“I don’t know,” Tooth is quick to say, resuming her march towards and then into Jack’s shack. She places the scimitar back inside of the umbrella holder, just as the Guardian of Hope comes storming into the cabin.

The first thing that comes out of his mouth is, “Yer lyin’, Tooth. I’ve known ya a long time, and ya’ve never been very good with holdin’ onto secrets.”

She doesn’t look at him, but she does slam her hands down against the desk top, unwilling to be talked down to. “I don’t know where Jack went. He told me that there were some people he had to see.”

“And then?” Bunny asks, stepping closer to her despite their earlier altercation.

“You know where he’ll go, Aster. He’ll go to Vela, and then he’ll leave for Valhalla,” she tells him sadly, bitterly.

“Why’re ya so convinced that Jack‘ll take Vela up on ‘er offer?” demands Merida, from where she and Hiccup stand near the door, which is closed off to the blizzard that still hasn’t completely settled outside.

“Because she knows something we don’t,” the Holly King says from his companion’s side. “Don’t you, Toothiana?”

The Tooth Fairy turns her head to look at him, expression tight, and Bunny can’t help but wonder about their history. And, judging by the look on the Summer sprite’s face, she’s wondering the same thing.

“I do,” the woman confirms, turning back to stare in the still-open desk drawer in front of her. Her hand presses along the top of a simple notebook in the drawer, lips thinning. Baby Tooth sits beside the journal and she looks up at her mother, placing her tiny hands over Toothiana’s in an effort to comfort. “We were wrong, last year. Jack did get ahold of his tooth box, but not the way we thought, and after he found Baby, she showed him how to activate it.” She turns to look at Bunnymund. “You want to know, don’t you? If I knew about Jack’s death—I did, after Baby told me.” She chews on her bottom lip, something that she herself often reprimands Jack for doing when he’s anxious. “Jack had a little sister, a little girl who looked just like him; he loved her so much.” When she says this, her tone is almost fond.

“What does this have to do with anything?” Hiccup asks, confused. Aster’s expression matches his well.

But for Merida, who has three little brothers of her own, it clicks right away. “Oh Gods,” she says quietly, and Tooth looks up at her briefly, before turning away.

“When Baby Tooth told me Jack’s story, I looked into his family’s background,” Toothiana admits. “Pippa Overland died in battle and was taken to Valhalla as a reward for her valor.

“Jack died to save her and now, when Vela tells him that Pippa is waiting for him in Valhalla-” she stops herself, but she doesn’t have to finish.

 Because each one of them knows that they would accept Vela’s offer if it meant seeing family on the other side.

“Then we just gotta stop the Valkyrie from sayin’ anything’ t’ Jack,” Bunny says determinedly. “C’mon, if I know Jack, he’ll go t’ see Jamie first.” The boy was rather close, after all, his house not terribly far from the forest.

But Tooth shakes her head at him. “I won’t help you.”

The three other people in the room shoot her disbelieving looks. Aster, in particular, looks something close to infuriated, and she can tell that he’s just about ready to give her what-for, but she’s unwilling to take any reprimand from him, especially after what she’s just found out. “Do _not_ start with me, E. Aster Bunnymund,” she tells him, looking just as angry as he does. Her anger isn’t long-lived, though, because suddenly she lets her shoulders droop, as if the energy has just been sucked out of her. “What does it even matter to you? Isn’t this what you’ve wanted from the beginning? Aren’t you the one who said that Jack Frost wasn’t suited to be a guardian?”

Off to the side, Merida makes noise like an angry cat.

“Things have changed!” Aster tells her furiously. “And are ya really willin’ t’ just let Jack die?”

“No!” Toothiana shouts, her energy returning, along with her anger. “I would give anything for Jack to be here, with us! I want to be laughing with him while he tells ridiculous stories and drinks that stupid tea that’s terrible for his teeth!” She reaches for the journal in the drawer, holds it up and shakes it in one hand while the other sweeps outward to draw attention to Jack’s ridiculous treasure trove. “I want him to be telling me about all these little things that he’s collected over his lifetime, instead of having to read about it from a book!” she looks at him, then down at the journal, clutches at it until her barely-there knuckles pale to white. “I wanted us to be a family; I wanted Jack to have a family; I wanted us to be the ones to give him that.

“In Jack’s journal, he says that he’s waiting for something to go wrong, and after everything that happened between the two of you during that Easter weekend, he figured that was it. He thought that he’d ‘ruined everything again’ and that, as soon as you told the others, we’d drive him away just like we did last time.” She is ashamed as she talks about it, now that she knows what really happened last Easter. “We’ve been so preoccupied with trying to puzzle Jack out that we haven’t even bothered trying to find out what he wanted or what he’s been feeling.

“That’s not family, Aster. And if we can’t give Jack a family, then I at least want him to be at peace and in Valhalla he’ll find both.” The admittance is a sad one.

Aster doesn’t know what he’s doing until he’s standing outside of the cabin, an air of wrath about him that can only be matched by that of the one on Easter of ’68, which he does _not_ think about, because by now he is questioning everything he’s ever known about Jack, and he can’t help but wonder just how wrong he was about that day. Just as he’s been wrong about so much else. He feels like destroying something, maybe throwing some rocks, but everything is covered in a thick blanket of snow, as far as he can see, and Jack was right; it’s a gorgeous sight.

And damn if that particular thought doesn’t make him feel all the more bitter.

Behind him the cabin door shuts, probably to keep the cold out and have a little quiet while they talk amongst themselves. That’s why it comes as a surprise when he hears the crunch of boots in the snow.

The little red-head comes to stand at his side, looking small but fierce as she stares out into the forest with her mouth set in a grim line. “I used t’ be just like you,” she tells him matter-of-factly, apparently about to instill her great wisdom on a being who is older than the very planet she inhabits. “I hated Jack with everythin’ in me.”

“I don’t hate ‘im!” he insists angrily.

“Don’t ya, though?” she asks. “Isn’t there some part of ya that can’t stand the way he flits about without stopping, or yammers on about nonsense, or the way he’s there when ya least want him t’ be? Or how ‘bout when yer doin’ somethin’ important and he interrupts? How ‘bout when ya just finish a project ya’ve been workin’ on fer days, and he pops in and destroys it in seconds?

“There were days when I wanted Jack dead, in the beginning.” She admits this with ease, and it strikes up a bright flare of _something_ in the center of Bunny’s chest, something distinctly unfriendly. “One day he made me so mad that I set him on fire; burned up his cloak and shirt, it took weeks fer him t’ heal the burns. Hiccup didn’t care overmuch, he was about as fond of Jackie as I was, back then.”

Bunny grits his teeth. “Ya better have a real good reason fer tellin’ me all this, Sheila.”

“It went on like that fer a long time, a good couple centuries, in fact. It wasn’t ‘til one cloudy Sunday morning that things changed.” She laughs, but it’s clearly forced, along with the smile she sends his way, which is more a baring of teeth than anything else. “In fact, I bet ya’d remember this particular day, because it was Easter Sunday of 1968. Wanna know what makes it so memorable fer me?” She poses it as though it’s a genuine question, but she keeps talking on, not giving him the chance to answer, “It was the day that Jack Frost came stumblin’ into me castle, a bloody mess, with only the wind and ‘is staff t’ hold ‘im up.” The Summer Queen turns away, and Aster thinks that he might actually get some answers for a second, but all she says is, “A lot of things changed that day.” She’s staring out at the white landscape. “Up until then, we’d just been toleratin’ each other for season’s sake. But that day, seein’ Jack as he was; Hiccup and I realized that it wasn’t right. We all realized that we needed each other,” she admits with a shrug.

“In a way, we owe ya, _Kangaroo_ ,” she says mockingly, “because Jack’s the reason I’ve got my immortal life, but _you’re_ the reason I found my second family, and it’s somethin’ that I needed back then—somethin’ that we all needed.”

(Even if Jack had never seen them that way; can’t see them that way for everything that she and Hiccup had put him through.)

“S’ppose that’s what a common enemy does fer ya,” Merida adds. “And that’s what ya were, Bunnymund; our enemy. Because ya’d hurt our Jack. We’ve hated ya fer years, Jack in particular.” She turns to face him full on, now. “Which is why it was _such_ a surprise when he told us what happened Easter night, and admitted to convincin’ little Jamie Bennett of your existence. You, out of everyone else, someone who hates him.”

“I don’t hate Jack!” Aster says again, and he feels like he’s on repeat.

The look that the girl gives him is one that he can’t quite place. “No, ya don’t. So what are ya feelin’ fer Jack, E. Aster Bunnymund? A little hope, maybe?” she offers. “The fairy princess isn’t willin’ t’ fight fer Jack, but I am.

"Are you?”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I had the hardest time writing this chapter out, but I am so glad it's finished.


	7. Chapter Seven

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Merida and Aster set off to save Jack and find out something very important in the process. Jack seeks forgiveness from someone who used to be very important to him, and he finally makes his decision.

Merida and Aster start at Jamie and Sophie’s house, while Hiccup stays behind with Toothiana, supposedly to talk some sense into her. Bunny, however, gets the feeling that the Warrior Queen’s speech got to the Viking more than he’s letting on. It’s clear that the pair are friends, possibly something more in the past, but the new allies don’t have time to ask questions, determined as they are to find Jack and talk him out of his literal last misadventure.

Much to their surprise, Jamie is already waiting for them when they arrive, and with one of his friends at his side. Bunny’s ashamed to say that he never got around to learning the names of each person in the little Burgess group. It’s one of the girls, though, and she looks a combination of solemn and nervous; a contrast to the excited expression that Jamie wears on his own face, which is odd, Aster thinks. Because Jamie is Jack’s biggest fan, he loves the guy like a big brother. So it’s strange to see the kid so happy when Jack _has_ to have just told him about the whole Moving On situation.

“Hi, Bunny!” the boy says excitedly, looking so excited that he’s practically vibrating in place, like an elf on chocolate. “Jack said you’d be coming by! You must be Summer!” He turns to Merida, who seems surprised that he’s addressing her, but smiles nonetheless. It’s a new look for someone that Aster has, thus far, only seen scowl. “Jack talks about you sometimes. He says that you and Spring are responsible for all the rain and storms that come along during your seasons!”

Merida offers him a crooked grin and nods her head. Her hair is pulled back in a French braid, but wayward curls still bounce with her movements. “Aye, laddie, that’d be us.”

“Do you get into fights often?” the girl at Jamie’s side finally pipes up. “I mean—because you’re carrying a bow and arrows. And also a really big sword.”

The summer sprite looks down at her gear and doesn’t even hesitate when she lies, “Nah, it’s just a precaution against any monsters that might be lurking around.” She curls her fingers into claws and bares her teeth, offering a mockery of a growl that makes her nose scrunch.

The little girl with auburn hair and eyes that match looks unimpressed. “Jack teaches us to fight with sticks,” she says frankly, and the much older woman snorts. “He calls them bos and jos.”

“It’s true,” Jamie offers with a shrug. “The ones he had were too big, so he carved smaller ones for us.”

Merida hardly pays him any mind, her sole focus on the girl who always seems to be wearing a beanie, no matter the season. “Who are you?” she asks curiously.

“I’m Pippa,” comes the girl’s simple answer.

“Pippa,” Merida and Aster say dumbly, and at once.

“Right!” Jamie exclaims, rushing over to a book on his desk. “That’s what I wanted to tell you!” The book he’s holding in his hands is one that involves genealogy, and it’s clear that everyone knows where this is going. “The last time Jack was here—and I mean before today—he asked me to look something up for him. Anyway, this is Philippa Jacqueline Overland-Marquee.” He sweeps his hand out towards her with a flourish, like he’s introducing royalty.

“Pippa,” she says again, forcefully and with a frown in her best friend’s direction.

“She’s Jack’s great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, _great-”_

“I think they get the idea, Jamie.” Pippa sighs and then looks up at the guardian and the sprite. “I guess Jack is my, uh, _very_ great uncle.”

“And you told Jack about this?” Merida asks, sounding almost urgent and she kneels down to face the two children properly.

“Jamie did,” Pippa pipes up, before her friend can say anything. “I didn’t get here in time to see him off.” She looks glum about the whole thing. “He’s going to be okay, right?”

Lady Summer looks confident as she stares at the worried girl. “Definitely,” she promises.

“How can you be so sure?” Pippa asks, still not entirely convinced.

Merida smiles at her, her expression genuine and soft. “’Cause Jack never leaves family behind.”

Aster feels the little girl’s— _Jack niece_ —hope come alive, swift and powerful, like a bolt of lightning through the chest. He doesn’t know why it surprises him, but it does, and it makes him feel all the more guilty; one more thing to top onto the list of shit that he’s put Jack through. At this point, it feels like something heavy, weighing on his shoulders. He crouches down to eye-level with Pippa and asks, “Do ya know where Jack went?”

She looks to Jamie, who suddenly seems nervous. “I’m not supposed to say,” the boy admits.

“Please, Jamie,” the Easter Bunny begs.

The human still looks unsure for a moment, before he finally relents and says, “All Jack told me is that he needed to see the Sun one last time.”

Aster feels as confused as the Last Light looks but judging by the look on Merida’s face, she knows exactly what he means. She marches towards the window and climbs out onto the roof, ready to go, while Bunny stands up and reaches out to ruffle Jamie’s hair and mess up Pippa’s beanie. “We’ll see the pair of ya later,” he promises.

“With Uncle Jack?” asks Pippa, and Aster has never heard someone address Jack so strangely, but he nods nonetheless.

“With Uncle Jack,” he agrees, his mouth feeling funny around the words.

 

“I’m an uncle,” Jack says, feeling dumber by the minute, the more he says it; and he’s been saying it a lot since he found out.

He’s in a forest somewhere in Poland, dragging his staff along the ground, frost trailing behind him and melting just as quickly as it forms, while he talks to himself.

He’d come here to look for someone, but she was usually the one to find him. Either her or-

“Hey there, Frosty.”

Jack sighs, scrubbing a hand over his face and then through his hair, shaking off any wayward stress flakes, before he turns to face the very last person he wants to see right now.

“You shouldn’t talk to yourself, you know, people might think you’re crazy.”

“Usually she comes to get me herself,” he says. “She mad at me or something?”

“Well, one night you pop up, say you’ve been chosen by the big guy on the moon to be a Guardian of Childhood, and then you don’t call or write for a year? Yeah, you could say she’s a tad irritated.”

Jack rolls his eyes so hard that it actually hurts, but that’s probably mostly due to the migraine that’s been building in the back of his head for the past couple of days. “Might wanna lay off the sarcasm, Eugene; when you use it, you tend to come off as less funny and more of a giant asshole.”

Eugene pushes off the tree he’s been leaning on as Jack approaches, and they mirror each other in each step they take, circling. “Well see, Frosty, that’s the thing. When it comes to you, I’m usually not even trying to be funny.”

The exasperated, “Eugene,” that come their way from Jack’s left has both men freezing in place, one case more literal than the other, when a twitch of the winter spirit’s staff has the former thief’s legs iced quite solidly to the ground. The immortal nearly face-plants, arms wind-milling in an effort to maintain balance, but he manages to catch himself and shoots a cutting glare the other man’s way. The sighed, “Jack,” is just as exasperated.

“Rapunzel,” Jack’s sigh is mocking, even as the former Queen of Corona steps into the clearing and out from the shade of the trees that lean towards her, following her path as though she is the sun. Flowers spring up from the grass in the wake of each step she takes. The Winter King spots a few asters among the trail and determinedly ignores the heavy thump of his heart against his rib cage, chalking it up to the closeness of the woman that he has loved for nearly three centuries. “Long time no see,” he says casually, not quite meeting her eyes as he rocks on the balls of his feet, ignoring Flynn’s irritated grunting as he struggles to free himself, just as he has every time Jack has trapped him in ice. He manages to wiggle one foot free, but his boot remains caught.

The Polish King breathes in through his nose and presses his thumb and forefinger into closed eyes. It’s a familiar sight.

“And whose fault is that?” Rapunzel inquires.

Jack tilts his head at her, taking in the changes that he normally ignores. He’s never really gotten used to seeing her with the short, brown hair that she came back with after her adventures with Flynn Rider, always caught up in thoughts of long, golden locks and their healing properties. But he is tired of lingering in the past, and he’s finished with long-held grudges. So he looks back at Eugene, and he lets the ice around the other man melt, something that surprises husband and wife. The former squints at him and asks, “Everything alright, snowball?”

The minor trickster is dressed rather modernly, much like his wife; leather boots, a pair of jeans, a plain t-shirt, and a plaid over-shirt with the cuffs rolled up to his elbows. It’s almost a comical parody of what he’d worn when Jack first met him, except he looks like a damn lumberjack.

Rapunzel has a pair of jeans as well, and a ruffled light-purple tank-top, with a lilac cardigan over it. But she doesn’t wear any socks or shoes. The Oak Queen and the Winter King have always been alike in that sense; wearing anything on their feet has always felt too restrictive. It was one of the things that had helped them relate in the beginning. But looking at her and her partner now, thinking about how Merida and Hiccup have changed with the times all these years—it makes Jack feel old. He had clung to the belongings that he’d been brought back with because they were _his_. He’d collected so much over the years but had never felt like any of it had belonged to him. What had belonged to him had given him a connection to his past.

Now though, regaining some of his memories, finding Pippa’s great granddaughter ( _his neice_!), it made him feel like none of it mattered.

Jack looks at Rapunzel, inwardly reaches out for the feelings that have made him avoid her for so long, the feelings that have made the infamous Eugene Fitzherbert someone to hate and envy, and he feels love; but it’s not the kind of love that makes him yearn. It isn’t the kind of love that makes him want to learn to paint just so he can impress her.

“I love you,” he says softly to only person that he ever thought he would love. Off to the side, Eugene makes an indignant noise. “You were- _are_  my greatest friend, and I love you, but I’m not _in love_ with you,” he clarifies.

His best friend’s green eyes go soft and a little bit sad. She quietly tells him, “I love you too, Jack. You know that.”

She looks like maybe she’ll cry, and Jack feels like he might, too.

“Is it too late to say that?” he wonders, swallowing down the lump in his throat, and suddenly he has an armful of Spring, her grip on him stronger and bolder than probably even North.

“Never!” she insists. “I’ve been here for three centuries, Jack. It will never be too late for us.”

He closes his eyes and squeezes her back, wishing that were true.

When they pull away from each other, a hand comes down on Jack’s shoulder, and he looks over at Eugene, who has his boot back on, and a serious expression in place. “Something you need to share with the class, Frosty?” he asks quietly, and the man has _never_ looked so worried for the King of Winter.

Jack slumps a little, bites his lip, and nods. “Yeah,” he admits, “but first I need a favor.”

Rapunzel and Eugene don’t live in some cloaked castle, like Merida and her brothers. They don’t live with a clan of dragons in some icy cavern, like the one Hiccup’s mother left for him. Again, much like him, the Oak Queen prefers the same small spaces that Jack does. Which is why she and Eugene built themselves a sturdy little cottage in their little forest, close to a nearby river, with a roof covered in ivy leaves, and walls crafted with stone. It looks like something straight out of a Thomas Kinkade painting.

Inside, at the center of the living room, Jack stands absolutely still, staring at his deer-skin pants and blue hoodie, which have been carefully folded and set aside on one of the cushions of the nearby love seat. Rapunzel is crouched in front of him, every bit of her focus on avoiding her friend’s pale skin as she hems the bottoms of his dark blue, light-weight jeans. They cling to him almost as tightly as his centuries-old pants had, and the new material feels strange against his skin, but they’re flexible enough and not uncomfortable. And they make him feel better somehow, newer maybe. It’s a good feeling.

He plucks at his white and gray t-shirt, while Eugene stands nearby, watching him from the corner of his eye, and whacking excess pixie dust off a brown jacket. “So,” he says, unfortunately interrupting the rather comfortable silence. Over the years, he’s made a habit of doing that. “You going to let us in on what’s got you so down?”

Jack doesn’t even put any effort in building up the usual irritation that he feels for the other man, but he’s not sure where to start. He remains silent for a moment, searching for the words.

“Does this have anything to do with Vela and that party at Santoff Clausen?” the trickster asks, and Jack gives him a surprised look.

“How-?”

“Coyote gave me a call,” he admits.

“You have a phone? _Coyote_ has a phone?”

“Cell phones,” Eugene clarifies. “It’s the twenty-first century.”

Rapunzel looks up as she finishes off her work. “You and Vela were at a party? I thought you two swore off parties after Thor-”

“There were…extenuating circumstances,” Jack tells her vaguely, cutting her short. “Anyway, long story short, I died to save my sister, the powers-that-be dubbed it an unintentional sacrifice, Vela popped up to take me to Valhalla, MIM stopped her, but told her that she could take me once I regained my memories, and she showed up at the party to usher me away to a warrior’s paradise.”

Eugene is gaping at him, but Rapunzel doesn’t look terribly worried. She says, “You’re here though; you declined.”

Jack hesitates just a second too long, and she darts up from her crouched position with a speed that he has never seen her use before. “Jack, tell me you declined,” she pleads.

“No.” He shakes his head. “Not yet?” he offers.

“Why are you phrasing it as a question? You can’t tell me that you really want to go to Valhalla; that you want to leave us.”

“Leave who?” Jack demands and then back-tracks. “I mean, of course I don’t want to leave you, but you have Eugene now, and other than that…” He shakes his head. “I tried to make things work with the guardians, but things…aren’t working out, and Hiccup and Merida…” He makes a frustrated noise. “In the beginning, I told the Guardians that I didn’t belong with them because they were all work, and I was all snowballs and fun-times. But now, I don’t feel that, Rapunzel. I don’t feel like I can bring joy to anyone else’s life when I can’t even find any happiness in my own. MIM brought me back to life for one reason, and now that I’ve done what he wanted me to, I don’t feel like I have a purpose anymore.” He brings his hands up, presses the heels of his palms into his eyes. “I thought I could find family with the guardians, but _nothing_ has changed. At least, I didn’t think so…”

Small hands curl around his wrist, tugging his hands away from his face, and he blinks hard to clear his eyes.

“Then forget the guardians,” Rapunzel insists. “You’re _my_ family, Jack. Maybe you haven't always been, but you are now and that's what counts.”

Eugene sighs at their side. “And, I guess you’re my family, too,” he admits awkwardly, which makes Jack cough out a watery laugh.

“And soon our family will be bigger,” Rapunzel says with a nervous grin. “I’m pregnant. You’re going to be an uncle.”

Jack stares dumbly at her, trying to process all of this. “I have a niece,” he recalls suddenly.

“Well, not yet,” she replies, her face scrunching up in confusion. “And we don’t really know if it’s a girl or a boy.”

“No,” he says, shaking his head. “My sister, Pippa, she had children, and back in Burgess, I have a great, great, great, great, great, great, great, _great_ -”

“We get it, buddy,” Eugene tells him.

“Anyway, yeah, her name is Philippa Jacqueline Overland-Marquee, but she goes by Pippa!” Jack says with a grin.

“I would, too, if my name were that long,” says a certain trickster, but he goes ignored.

“Jack, that’s wonderful!” Rapunzel says giddily. “See, you _do_ have a family, Snowflake. You’ve got Pippa and, if you want, you’ve got us too. You have a purpose, Jack; maybe you don’t feel it right now, maybe things aren’t going well with the guardians, but these things take time. So give us some time and give them a chance. All of this, in such a small amount of time, is a lot to take in. Don’t let your fears get in the way of your happiness.”

Jack looks at her, and he looks at Eugene, and then he starts to nod, very slowly. “Okay,” he says quietly. “Yeah, okay; you’re right. Maybe I haven’t given all of this time to set in properly.”

“Of course she’s right,” Eugene says with all the knowledge of a man who knows that his wife can kick his ass. He holds out a pixie-dust-free coat, and helps Jack slide it on. It fits nicely and offers a comforting weight on his shoulders. The Winter King plays with the flaps over the pockets, fiddles with the buttons and smiles at his friend and—his friend. He smiles at his _friends_. It’s hard to think of them as family right now, after everything that has happened, particularly with his history with Rapunzel, but he’s more than willing to try. Hopefully they’ll get there, eventually.

Then his ears catch up with his brain, and the grin that spreads across his face makes his cheeks ache.

“You’re having a baby,” he says in amazement, hand reaching out to fit over her stomach. He can’t see it through her loose, ruffled shirt, but he can feel the bump under his palm and fingers, firm under his touch. Rapunzel beams and turns her head to look at Eugene, who stares back at her with a soft smile, and for the first time since Jack met the other man, he is happy for his friend’s choice; happy that she gets to have this; happy that she found someone who loves her so much.

When she looks back at him, that joy is still glowing across her face, and she laughs and nods. “Yeah.”

“You’re having a baby!” Jack repeats, this time nearly shouting, as he scoops his best friend up in a hug and spins her around. Snowflakes burst to life in the air, raining down on the three of them. When they come to a stop, he sets her down, but doesn’t let go. Eugene still watches from the side, smile still firmly in place, though he looks like he’s feeling a little awkward.

Jack reaches out and yanks him into the hug.

They step out for a moment while he packs his old clothes into a borrowed bag, getting ready to set out and find Vela to give her his answer. When his friends return, however, they’re carrying bags of their own.

“Oh no,” he says, shaking his head as he waves his hands in front of him in immediate denial. “You can’t go! Especially when you’re-”

The look that comes over Eugene’s face is grave and forbidding as he looks at Jack Frost. “No,” that looks says. “Abort. Abort.” Rapunzel’s narrowing green eyes make him all the more wary.

“-season has just started up,” the frostling says smoothly, putting his best bull-shitting powers to the test.

“Then I guess it’s a good thing that spring is just starting where Vela will be,” Rapunzel says, cheery and purposeful in the way she ignores Jack’s obvious fumble. She turns and walks out the door, heading for the door. “I can kick some Valkyrie butt _and_ do some work while I’m over there.”

“For a second there I thought I was going to die again,” Jack says, sounding quite dramatic.

The expression on the other man’s face is knowing; experience, probably. He claps a hand on the winter elf’s shoulder with a cheery smile. “Day’s still young!”

And, okay, Jack has given up the ghost, but damage had been done—obviously. He had a lot to make up for, so he let the comment slide; shrugged it off his shoulders like a light dusting of snow and secured his bag a little more firmly. Rapunzel was already out the door, Pascal perched on her shoulder as she went, and Jack and Eugene followed. “So have you guys thought of any names? I hear Jackson’s pretty popular these days,” the winter sprite says with a cheeky grin. Up ahead, the Spring Queen laughs at him.

She reaches up to Pascal, strokes a finger down his spine until she gets to his tail, which he curls around the digit. As soon as she settles him down on the forest floor, he begins to grow and change shape, taking on the form of large-scaled beast with flying wings; a dragon. It’s a simple spell, one of the first that she had learned from her mentor to help her get around since she couldn’t summon any of the winds the way Jack could. If Pascal minded, he’d never given a chirr of irritation. In fact, the transformation always seemed to give the little (or not so little, now) guy’s ego quite the boost. “Actually, we were thinking of going with the name Anxelin.”

Jack stares at her, expression blank. He asks, “Is it, like, a tradition in your family to stick your offspring with the worst possible names you can think of?” Not far behind him, a tree leans in his direction, extending a branch to whack him upside the head. He yelps and leaps forward, whipping around to glare at his attacker, and then back at Rapunzel, who is conveniently too focus on climbing onto the lizard’s back to pay any mind to her friend’s narrow-eyed glare.

“All her idea,” Eugene coughs. “I wanna go with Alex, but she’s insisting on Anxelin; says it’s because it’s gender-neutral, and we don’t know the gender of the baby yet, but Alex is gender neutral, right?”

Jack holds up his hands and goes, “I am _so_ not getting in the middle of this.”

The younger immortal huffs at him. “Please, if something is going on, you are _always_ in the middle of it—case in point.” He makes a vague gesture, and the winter spirit can’t exactly deny it, but he still glares at the other man.

“Yeah, well, this is one thing I’m staying out of,” he insists, just before he lets Tate sweep him up into the air (and he definitely doesn’t miss the suspicious lack of Notus’s presence).

“We’re not naming the baby Alex.” Rapunzel informs her husband as he climbs onto Pascal’s back and loosely loops his arms around her waist, always so careful.

“I still think you should go with Jackson!” Jack hollers from above them, as Pascal lifts into the air.

Laughter trails behind him as he takes off like a rocket, and Rapunzel echoes the sound with giggles of her own as she urges Pascal on. Behind her, Eugene lets out a yelp of surprise, just barely hanging on as the reptile launches ahead with an excited chirr.

Things weren’t perfect, but they were better, and the sooner they took care of the situation with Vela, the sooner they could start making up for the past.

And they knew well that they all had mistakes to make up for. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm not sure how I feel about the way this chapter turned out. Not great, I suppose, but if I did anymore editing, I probably would have just tossed my laptop right out the window.
> 
> A few interesting facts:
> 
> Disney is working on a live-action TV series that is based around Belle and Adam's son. However, it also includes Rapunzel and Eugene's daughter, who is named Anxelin.
> 
> The Kingdom of Corona, where Rapunzel was born, was based off several cities in Poland. It most resembles one city in particular; Gdynia. 
> 
> Disney's version of the Rapunzel story was set sometime during the 1700's.


	8. Chapter Eight

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Jack isn't the only one affected by his situation and the guardians begin to realize that the Seasonal Sprites might be at fault for the rift between them and their little Winter King. Merida's anger drives her to over-share with Aster, while Hiccup's determination helps Toothiana realize something that she hadn't considered before. Meanwhile, Nightlight pays North and Sandy a visit to deliver a message from MiM and reveals that Vela's intentions may be less innocent and more sinister than any of them could have imagined.

When they eventually reach Rapunzel and Eugene’s _charming_ little cottage in the forest near their former-kingdom, there is hoar frost on the lovely spring grass, making it clear that Jack has already been by. However, judging by the lack of light and movement within her friend’s home, and the way the ice has begun to melt, dripping from the blades of grass in the late-setting sun, he has also already gone, and he’s apparently taken his Spring counterpart and her troublemaking husband with him.

It’s a revelation that has Bunnymund cussing a blue-streak in languages that Merida doesn’t understand, and she knows a lot of languages. The Easter Bunny’s angry outburst has Maximus, who has just returned home, putting on an impressively offended expression that could match any human. An expression that he then follows up with an eye-roll that looks like it might send his eyeballs rolling straight out of their sockets. The unimpressed horse reaches around to the satchel that’s settled over his back and pulls out a small, folded up piece of paper, which he spits at Merida, who is now feeling far less understanding.

She glares at him as she unfolds it, and then looks down to peer at her friend’s slightly-sloppy handwriting, something that always surprises her when she sees it, because she doesn’t understand how Rapunzel can be so talented with a brush and her pencils, but so terribly wretched with a pen. With a sigh, she squints at the paper and spends a couple of moments trying to decipher the other woman’s scribbles. What she eventually translates gets her so steamed up that she nearly sets the piece of paper on fire. “Says here that Rapunzel talked t’ Jack an’ he’s decided t’ stay. Somethin’ gooey about family and second chances.” She’s quiet for a moment, dodging Maximus when he nips at her hair. “Guess they made up, then.” She doesn’t know why, but she’s frowning about it.

Jealousy, a wistful voice whispers in the back of her mind. You’ll never have what they do. You’ll never share in the friendship that they have. All because of a grudge that amounted to nothing, in the end. She has all but forgotten about Bunnymund until he speaks up from behind her.

“Who’s made up?” he asks her. “Jack and this Rapunzel girl?”

Merida wants to laugh, but she feels too somber for it—like a sulking child. “Yeah, tha’ Rapunzel girl—though, these days, everyone’s been callin’ ‘er Olwen.”

The alien visibly stars at that, obviously having not been expecting it. “Jack was on bad terms with Spring.” Then he snorts, “Of course he was.”

Merida doesn’t even try to tone down the glare that she throws his way.

“What’d the little ice cube do to get on Spring’s bad side?”

Lady Summer squints at the guardian, wondering if she should tell him. The whole thing irks her to no end—not just his assumption, but the way that Jack has chosen to spend what he’d expected to be his last day alive.

He’d cast away her and Hiccup, but he had gone running to Rapunzel, and he’d probably begged her for forgiveness when he had nothing to be sorry for. Merida knew well that she and the Holly King had done their Winter counterpart great wrongs in the time that they’d known him. Jack swears that he has forgiven them, every time they ask, but she knows that he hasn’t forgotten. She knows in the way his skin ices over like make-shift armor when she draws close to him; she knows in the way he avoids eye-contact with Hiccup when the former chief is near. But despite all of that, Merida has always considered what Rapunzel did far worse than anything she and Hiccup inflicted on Jack Frost.

And yet it is Rapunzel that Jack comes to on his final day.

Merida looks at Bunnymund and think about his temper—one that matches her own, if it does not exceed it—and wonders at what his reactions might be if he truly cares for Jack, as he claims.

So she tilts her head at him, and it is with a bitter smile that she says, “It wasn’t her bad side that Jack was on; quite the opposite, in fact.”

Back at the cabin, things are at a stand-still, though Toothiana feels like it’s more of a stand-off, at the rate things are going between her and Hiccup. The Holly King seems to be on a single-minded mission to get her to “see reason” as it were, and she has never seen him look so determined in all the time that she’s known him. They’ve been arguing for the past hour, she just doesn’t know why.

“Are you really so willing to let him die? Someone who’s supposed to be your friend? Your ally?” he asks, the irritation on his face quite clearly verging on true anger.

“Yes!” she shouts, just as angry, and her vehemence apparently gives him pause. “If Jack can’t be happy here; if we can’t be what he needs; if he cannot _find peace_ with us—then I will fight every person who stands between him and the gates to Valhalla,” she says fiercely. “Jack Frost has been alive for 319 years, but do you know when, exactly, I first heard word of him? Because I do—after all, I am the keeper of memories, and the keeper of memories never forgets.”

The tension between them is stifling, because Hiccup knows exactly where this is going. “The first I heard of Jack was from you, little Viking,” she hisses angrily.

Their friendship had only just started to turn itself into something permanent back then. Not to the point where they were freely exchanging secrets, but it was nice enough to be able to share what they felt with one another.

Hiccup had shown up at Punjam Hy Loo in a huff, dismounting from Toothless before the dragon had even had the chance to settle properly.

“I hate him,” the young man had said, looking not unlike a pouty child.

Toothiana had been different back then; less work, only a few dozen faeries at her disposal, because that was all that she’d needed. So she’d taken a pause in her duties to pull him aside and talk. “Who do you hate, seabreeze?” she had asked, using a nickname that she had given him not long after their first meeting. Because the former chief always brought with him that light autumn breeze, and the smell of saltwater from where he lived—no longer in Berk, but in that icy cavern instead, still close to the ocean as it was. A bitter look had crossed his face, not unlike the one that twists it now, and he’d said, “Jack Frost,” between gritted teeth.

“In all the years that you complained about him, that was the only time that you used his name,” Tooth says, feeling as bitter as her former friend looks. “After that it was all about _Frostbite_. You lecture me on friendship, Hiccup Horrendous Haddock, but I heard Merida, and I was there for every hate-filled word that you had for Jack for years until 1968. I have done him a great wrong in that way and in many others, but at least in this, I know I am doing him a kindness.” She turns around and heads for the door by way of twitching feathers and nervous wings.

“A-A kindness?” Hiccup can’t believe what he’s hearing. Or perhaps it’s that he doesn’t want to hear it, he admits to himself. But, “for someone who is so in love with Winter himself, you’re pretty quick to just send him off to his death!”

Tooth turns back to him, her anger easily melted in the face of Hiccups hasty taunting. “I am not in love with Jack, Hiccup. I do love him; the way any mother would love a son.” Her shoulders slump, and Hiccup feels awful, because he knows what his old friend has wanted more than anything in the past several decades. “But I’m not _in love_ with him. There is only one person in this cabin who is in love with Jack Frost, and it’s not me.” She looks at him pointedly, but before he can say anything in return, North’s booming voice calls from outside the cabin.

“Tooth!”

The Warrior Queen pays no mind to Hiccup as she whips around and throws open the door, eager to face the man waiting for her on the other side. Baby Tooth is at her back, facing down the dragon rider with her little arms crossed and a defensive look on her little face. Bring it, that expression says. The little faerie is clearly ready to take on the Fall King in order to protect her mother. He’d find it funny if not for their current situation.

Hiccup hasn’t seen much of the infamous Santa Claus, but the whole fur-lined, red coat is kind of a dead giveaway, in more than one sense. He stands out against the snow that covers Burgess Forest, weighing down any spring fauna that’s supposed to be lighting the area up. As for the Sandman, well, he stands out wherever he is; what with the whole _glowing gold sand_ thing.

Toothiana rushes outside despite the freezing cold and throws herself at Nicholas St. North, who doesn’t even budge under her weight, with how light she is. The Guardian of Wonder wraps his arms around her, making her look even smaller than she already is. “моя любовь, you are so cold,” he says when they separate, and Tooth pulls him down for a kiss, even as he begins to shrug off his coat to give her. She stops him though, grasps the fur collar and pulls it back in place. “I’m fine, Nicholas,” she says softly, and Hiccup is astounded. This is nothing like the lonely warrior that the Queen of Flight was when he first met her. “Wow,” he says aloud, just kind of gaping. “Gotta say, I never really pegged you for the whole Mrs. Claus type.” Tooth glare at him over her shoulder, while Santa coughs awkwardly into his huge hand—and are those tattoos? “We’re not married.” The Sandman looks like he’s shuffling around mid-air, kicking one foot at nothing and flashing some symbols overhead that Hiccup can only imagine equate to “not yet.” The Viking chief gets the feeling that the only reason the dream weaver gets away with it is because Toothiana is too focused on _Santa Claus_ to take notice. She says, “Now what’s going on, what are you doing here?” Both of the newcomers seem to remember that they’ve come for a reason at the same time, and the Sandman shoots off some rapid-fire symbols, but stops just as quickly, because all of Tooth’s focus is on her, uh, boyfriend, who jumps right into some explanations of his own. “Naughty, eavesdropping Sergei explains what happened between Jack and Valkyrie last night,” he begins, and there is a pause as they all realize that it hasn’t even been a full day since this disaster first began. “He tells me that Valkyrie accused Manny of making promise to her and then a few hours later, visitor comes to workshop on Man in Moon’s behalf.” 

Sandy’s grains sing as he moves closer to them, and a familiar form takes shape over his head, one that has Tooth sucking in a surprised breath. “Nightlight,” she says, amazed. “Da,” North agrees. “He tells us that Manny wanted him to deliver message—says that the Tsar did stop Valkyrie from taking Jack, but never promised anything. Valkyrie _lied_ ,” he says angrily. 

“Why?” The tooth fairy asks, aghast at the idea. “Why would she do something like that?” 

“To get him alone,” Hiccup guesses. “Vela and Jack have known each other for two centuries, and he’s the only one who’s ever been able to find her when he looks. Valkyries live in these interdimensional pockets that only they can access, and Vela gave Jack the means to find and enter hers whenever he wants to. What better way to get Jack alone than to take him somewhere that no one else can get to?” He looks at Toothiana, expression serious. “Still sitting this one out?” 

She doesn’t say anything; instead, she pulls herself from the circle of North’s arms and marches back into the cabin, brushing passed Hiccup as she goes. When she comes back out, Jack’s borrowed sword is in her hand once more, and the expression on her face is angry and determined. “No, I’m not ‘sitting this one out.’ Congratulations, I am convinced; now let’s hunt this bitch down and find out just what, exactly, she’s up to.” 

“Da,” North agrees, and Sandy nods, his small arms crossed, and his lips pursed. 

A trill sounds from above, though, and they all look up just in time to see a Terrible Terror descend, doing its best to land, but essentially just crashing into the nearest pile of snow. Toothless, who has been lounging nearby, reaches out to paw at the mound of snow, scooping the first few layers away and flinging the much smaller dragon free. It chirps and shakes any loose flakes free, before turning to Hiccup. It lets out a series of squeaks, chirps, and unimpressive growls at the former chief, who looks back at it in surprise. The Holly King cusses in his native tongue, while Toothiana lets out a hiss of unhappiness. “What has happened?” North asks in concern. “That was a message from Merida—I had Nautilus here trailing her and Bunnymund; apparently Jack’s already made his rounds, and he’s on his way to see Vela.” 

“We have to get there before Jack does,” says Tooth, and she moves towards North, gripping his jacket. “Please tell me you have a globe with you.”

The old Cossack pulls one from a pocket in his coat lining and says, “Never leave home without one,” with a grin that is quickly taken over by a frown. “But where are we going?”

Hiccup’s face is twisted into something grim as he looks up at the guardians and says, quite simply, “We’re going to Berk.”

None of them—even though they rush to a once-thriving Viking village—realize that they won’t make it in time.

Because, as they’re racing to reach their friend, he is waving at Rapunzel and Eugene Fitzherbert as he steps into the portal that will take him to Vela the Valkyrie.

Though three people watch him step through that portal, only one knows that the Winter spirit is getting himself into; and though Tsar Lunar has always had great power, it is just as useless now as it has always been when it comes to Jack Frost. All he can do is hope that the young immortal makes it through this the same way that he has made it through everything else that has been thrown at him over the past 319 years.

Far down below, Jack Frost smiles at his friends as the portal closes between them and tries to swallow down the foreboding feeling that overcomes him as he is cut off from the other world.

Vela’s home is just as he remembers, warm but not overpowering, walls lined with weapons, and very reminiscent of what he’d seen of Asgardian décor. It shouldn’t be possible, but her voice echoes off the walls when she speaks.

“Hello, Jack.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> моя любовь, pronounced "moya lyubov'" means "my love" in Russian. Or, at least, that's what google translate tells me.


	9. Chapter Nine

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Vela reveals just what her betrayal entails. Jack faces someone from his past that he never expected to see again. We still don't know what happened at Loki's party, and he's certainly not going to tell.

Hiccup shows up only seconds before everyone else seems to find their way onto the island and only because he’d leapt off Toothless as soon as Berk was in sight to use his gear to glide his way home, Notus speeding up his flight considerably. She’s whispering in his ear as he lands, urgent and rushed little things, too hurried for him to understand. He hits the ground in a pounding run, spotting Rapunzel’s usual burst of colour amongst the wreckage. Eugene is there with her, always at her side, arm around her shoulder as she leans into his side. She’s got one of her arms slung around his waist and the other is…huh—the other is tucked up against her side as her forearm rests against the small swell of her stomach. The Holly King shoves that particular revelation away for another time as he rushes towards them, tearing his mask off as he goes so they know who’s coming when they turn his way.

“Hiccup?” Rapunzel says in surprise, arm quickly dropping away from her stomach so that her hand can tug at her shirt, which would have effectively hidden her little secret from him, if he hadn’t already seen what she’s trying so hard to hide.

“Where’s Jack? Tell me you didn’t let him go through the portal to see Vela!” He knows he’s yelling, but he can’t help it. If Jack is already gone-

“He just left,” Eugene confirms, much to his growing horror. And, apparently, everyone else’s.

There are cries of denial and outrage all around, as Merida and the guardians suddenly surround them.

Tooth hovers nearby with North at her side; his large fists are clenched around twin sabers. The golden sand that makes up a former star-pilot’s form sounds like it’s grinding in angry shifts, and various symbols form over his head, all coming and going too quickly to make any sense of. Bunny has just emerged from his tunnel, and he reaches down to yank Merida out before it closes up. As they take in Eugene’s announcement, they’re all taken with varying degrees of anger and disbelief.

“And ya just let ‘im?” The Easter Bunny snarls angrily at the Spring Goddess and her husband.

Rapunzel takes a step back in surprise. She had always been on good terms with Aster, up until Easter of ’68—both of them being archetypes of Spring and all—so the sudden hostility when they haven’t even seen each other in 44 years comes as a surprise. The guardian is very much in her space, and she is hardly holding her husband back from a violent reaction of his own, when the Pooka suddenly takes a step back and glances down at her stomach, any eyebrows that might be somewhere in all that fur raising so high that they’re practically level with his ears. She almost reaches up to cup it, something that has become a habit over the past couple of months, but she stops herself. Then the alien glances at Eugene’s hand twined with hers, and the threatening look that the trickster is sending his way, and he seems to _relax_.

Oh, Rapunzel thinks, blinking as things slot into place. She clears her throat and brings all her focus back to the situation at hand. “Don’t worry, we talked with Jack. He’s decided to stay and gives things a second chance,” she explains, but there’s no relief to be seen, no one looks happy or excited. If anything, they look angrier and more despondent by the second. “Okay, what’s going on?”

“Wouldn’t ya like t’ know?” Merida says bitterly, one more surprise for the former Queen.

“Merida!” Hiccup reprimands.

“What?” demands the hot-tempered sprite. “Why’re ya always playin’ mediator, Hic’? Aren’t ya tired of playin’ second fiddle t’ her?” She whips around to face Rapunzel. “All ya’ve ever done is string Jack along, play with ‘im like some sorta toy, an’ then toss ‘im away when ya found someone better t’ fall for. And yet, his last day here, ya’re th’ one he comes to.” She bares her teeth, and turns back to the Holly King, trying to reign in her temper. Quietly, she tells him, “Ya ever think that maybe, if she hadn’t come along, it’d be _you_ that Jack’d be moonin’ over?”

He glares back at her. “Low blow, Mer’.”

“Enough!” Queen Toothiana says shrilly. “We don’t have time for your petty arguments when Jack’s alone with that crazy bitch!” She turns to Rapunzel and Eugene as Bunny steps away from the bitter trio of Seasonal sprites to join his fellow guardians. “I’m going to go ahead and assume that Jack filled you in on everything, from beginning to…whenever he joined you. We’re here because Vela _lied_. He told you about her deal with MiM, right?”

Rapunzel is quiet and still, unusual to those who know her, but Eugene gives a begrudging nod to the question.

“Deal was made-up; Manny never made promise to Valkyrie girl,” North supplies, earning a glare from his girlfriend for the interruption.

Aster’s head snaps around to face them so fast that his neck actually cracks. “What?” he hisses out. Merida looks just as surprised from her place beside Hiccup. There hadn’t been time to tell them before everyone headed for Berk.

Toothiana makes a frustrated noise and barrels on, “How do we get to Jack? There must be _some way_ for us to access whatever…dimensional pocket that the Valkyrie has him in.”

Merida shrugs, and Hiccup shakes his head, looking rather despondent. Rapunzel is hesitant when she speaks up, but she says, “If there is one, we’ve never been able to find it.”

Sandy waves his arms, snaps fingers that make no sound, forms symbols over his head, but all of his efforts go unnoticed. Huffing, sandy teeth grinding, he finally grabs hold of the nearest person (Bunny) and gives them a furious shake, back and forth, with surprise strength for such a short stature.

“O-Oy!” the Pooka shouts, teeth clacking as he’s shoved to and fro. He yanks his arm from the Sandman’s grip, stumbling away. “I ain’t a bleedin’ elf!” he says, but his anger isn’t on the same level that it usually is.

Nevertheless, Sandy has the attention that he wanted.

Tooth rests a small hand on his shoulder. “Oh, Sandy, I know you’re upset, but lashing out-”

The dream weaver shakes his head and brings to life a series of symbols above his head. _“I know exactly what we need to do._

 _“Who better to ask for help regarding Vela than the Valkyrie’s boss?”_ he asks with a sly quirk of his brow.

North’s expression lights up. “Sandy, you are genius! Traveling to other worlds can be problem, but not when you have help.”

“An’ the perfect bloke t’ lend us a hand would be a trickster who’s always hoppin’ from one world to another.” Bunny pipes up.

“Loki,” Toothiana says knowingly. “And he’ll jump at the chance to help Jack, especially after what happened at the last party that he and Thor threw.” A lot of curious faces turn her way, but her attention is all on North. “And it shouldn’t be too hard to find him, either, right? I mean, he took up Jack’s place at the top of the naughty list as soon as our little winter elf got his clean slate.”

“Da…” North agrees, though it’s clear by the expression on his face that he’s not sure how _she_ knows about that.

 _“Won’t be long now,”_ Sandy signs to Aster, who rolls his eyes. The Easter Bunny sighs, “Tell me about it.”

Their fellow guards turn to look at them, but the pair shrug and shake their heads in equal parts.

“Enough,” Merida orders, stepping towards them. She and the other Seasonal Sprites at least seem to have set aside their issues for the time being. “Let’s get t’ th’ North Pole and track down Loki so we can find out jus’ what th’ hell Vela’s up to.”

“Right,” Bunny says, and that serious atmosphere from before returns as they all think of the missing Winter King. “To the Pole.”

“I’m staying,” Hiccup says firmly and everyone pauses in the process of preparing their respective transportation for take-off. “Y’know…in case Jack comes back.”

“…Okay,” Tooth says simply, sadly, and she shoots him a pointed look, just before she lifts into the air.

They all get air-born or head underground, while Hiccup plops down onto a less-than sturdy stool in the ruins of his former home, with Toothless as his only companion, soft scales warm at his side. The Night Fury trills a sad tune at him, and Hiccup pats the side of his neck. “I know, buddy.

“I know.”

 

Sandy and Tooth go with North through one of the back-up snow globes, so they’re the first to arrive, and are therefore the first to be surprised when they find that Loki and Thor are standing in the globe room. Thor is blinking up at Phil as he shouts at him in Yettish, demanding to know how the two gods got passed the wards outside. Loki is turning the elves different colours for fun, something that reminds North of Jack and the way he’d once turned the elves to ice for no other reason than because they’d annoyed him. He didn’t do it anymore; especially not after Sergei had gotten his sweet revenge.

The two brothers look up at the three guardians when they step through the portal, and every worker in Santoff Claussen gives a sigh of relief, yeti and elf alike.

Loki strides forward, his expression turning serious. “Where is Jack?”

Sandy quirks an eyebrows and signs at him, _“What makes you think that he’s missing?”_

“Because I’ve been tracking him for the last three months, and I can no longer sense him,” the trickster says honestly.

Tooth’s wings flicker in alarm, eyes narrowing. “And why would you do a thing like that?”

“Because one of the Valkyries who works for my father and transports warriors to Valhalla went AWOL and we know that she contacted Jack at your party yesterday,” Thor injects, nodding to North.

“Vela,” Tooth says knowingly, hands fisting at her sides.

“Yes,” Loki agrees, rather grimly. “She also released a prisoner that we were keeping in Asgard under Jack’s request.”

 _“Jack asked you to detain someone?”_ Sandy signs, surprised.

“Yes,” says Loki, his usually devious smirk replaced with a frown. “Back in 1789, not long after we met him. He brought another Winter spirit to us, something of a failed experiment that Mother Nature had cast aside. She had supposedly ‘taken Jack under her wing,’ but then she went off the rails, tried to drain him of his powers and use them for herself. But it didn’t work, and Jack managed to defeat her. He brought her to us and asked us to keep her locked up, so that she couldn’t harm anyone else.”

Tooth frowns and chews on her bottom lip, thinking. “Why would Vela release someone like that? Especially knowing that the spirit would have such a grudge against Jack?”

At his brother’s side, Thor says, “Vela was assigned to keep watch over her cell, but Liath must have swayed the Valkyrie to her side, because they both fled Asgard two days ago.”

“Liath?” Merida shrieks, and they turn to see her and Bunnymund striding into the room. “Tha’ crazy bitch made it outta her cage? With _Vela’s_ help?”

“Speaking of crazy bitches…” Loki mumbles, upon seeing her, and Thor chokes on a laugh, trying to cover it up with a cough.

Merida glares at them, but doesn’t comment on it, instead saying, “If she gets her claws on Jack…”

“Yes, _exactly_ ,” says Loki. “Which is why we need to know where Jack is.”

Bunnymund shakes his head grimly. “Ya’re not gonna like what we’re about t’ tell ya, mate.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is really short, but it was important that I got it out of the way so that I could move the plot along.
> 
> Anyway, have some facts:
> 
> I could barely find anything about her, but Liath is a goddess of winter and destruction, known in a few countries (Ireland, Scotland, and Manx), and has several names, all of which are celtic. Also, I'm pretty sure she visits the town I live in every winter.
> 
> Also, Freyja, Odin's wife, is rumoured to be a former Valkyrie, and while Odin leads Valhalla, it is Freyja who rules over Folkvangr.  
> Folkvangr is a meadow or field where half of those that die in combat go upon their death.
> 
> Plus, I recently found out that Vela is the name of a star! Which is super cool.
> 
> Hey, did anyone else catch the lunar eclipse last night?


	10. Chapter Ten

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Vela has betrayed Jack and the Winter King doesn't quite cope so much as lose his shit. The Guardians show up to the party late, but there's nothing fashionable about it. It seems that Liath has won both the battles and the war. In the wake of broken promises and pasts unresolved, our heroes are left without a cause.

“My, you’ve certainly changed since I last saw you,” Liath says consideringly, watching Jack edge away from her, though she hasn’t moved an inch since her dramatic reveal. Still, he puts as much space between them as he can, staff aimed at her threateningly, though he doesn’t feel very intimidating at the moment. “Well, you haven’t changed at all. Still the same pasty, blue-haired bitch that sank her fangs into immortality just so she could leech power off whatever poor soul she manages to trap between her claws.”

Liath perks an unimpressed brow his way as she steps towards Vela instead of him, extending a hand.

“Don’t you-” Jack’s words die in his throat when Vela not only accepts the touch but moves into it. In fact, the Valkyrie takes the goddess’ hand and pulls her in so that they can wrap themselves around each other, only leaving enough space to share a rather intimate kiss.

And the Winter King can only stare on, feeling completely stunned, as his former mentor and now former friend smile and greet each other like old lovers. “Welcome home, darling,” Liath says softly, leaning in just slightly to give Vela an eskimo kiss.

“Glad to be home,” Vela replies, and she looks happier than Jack has ever seen her in all the years that he’s known her. It makes him feel sick and furious; he feels completely and utterly betrayed, and his lips tilt up at the corners, and at first it’s just a little huff of breath, something like a sob stuck in his throat, and then he is laughing. He laughs so hard that his sides ache because he hasn’t laughed like this in so long, hard enough that his eyes start to water, and he starts to wheeze. It’s all he can do; just laugh and laugh and laugh.

Liath looks just as unimpressed as before, and Vela looks confused, and that’s when his laughter turns into shouting. Not just shouting, a full blown, teeth grinding, growl of anger like a winter wolves he’s encounter over the years, like Merida shifted into bear-form when she’s pissed; it’s something feral, this fury that he’s always trying so hard to stuff down inside, where no one can see. But now he doesn’t care. He screams and launches arc after arc of icy stalagmite between the two lovers, separating him as best he can. He turns Vela’s home, something that had once been a _comfort_ to him, into an unmitigated disaster. He has spent so much time holding back, but now he destroys everything that his power can touch, and he backs Vela into one corner, freezing her hands to the walls so that she can’t draw on any of her weapons.

“You were supposed to be my _friend_!” he shouts, getting right up in her face, and watching with no sense of satisfaction as she flinches, turning her head to the side as though she expects him to strike her.

To his right, he has frozen Liath in layer after layer of ice, and Jack knows that it’s pointless, because she is a winter deity. She’s absorbing the power, taking it all in and breaking it down even as he stares into the face of a woman that he has spent centuries trusting with his life. But it doesn’t matter, because all Jack needs is _seconds_. He reaches up for the simple amulet that hangs around Vela’s neck, and she gasps, and Liath shrieks from her corner, and he bares his teeth in some sick parody of a smile that holds no happiness—no joy.

I have changed, thinks Jackson Overland, dead at 18 and with no family left to speak of.

I have changed, thinks Jack Frost, confused to the world he’d found himself in back in 1712, and relieved when, after years of isolation, a strange but kind woman had taken his hand and promised him something better.

I have changed, thinks the Winter King, scarred, betrayed, and lonely thing that he is. I have adapted, he thinks bitterly and angrily.

“I’m different,” he acknowledges aloud, squeezing the amulet in his hand until it begins to glow. “I’m done letting you people manipulate me; I’m _finished_ being your pawn. I won’t sit here and let you use me up until there’s nothing left. It’s your turn to listen to _me,_ and I want to go home!” The crystal that hangs from the cord around Vela’s neck flashes bright between them just as Liath breaks free of Jack’s make-shift trap and lunges for them. But they’re already gone, and she lets out a furious shout, claws digging into the wall, gouging out chunks of stone that land heavy on the wooden floor.

But all is not lost, she knows. Her lover’s amulet is not the only way out of this little pocket of space. The Winter deity turns, lips thinning at the sight of the destruction to their home, and then she stalks forward to begin her search.

Jack and Vela come bursting back into existence _above_ the small island of Berk mid-struggle. The Valkyrie strikes out with a kick that sends the winter spirit’s staff flying from his hand, spinning away and bringing forth a chest-restricting panic before he remembers what, exactly, is happening. He brings his focus back into the fight, just as Vela is expanding her wings, flapping them to slow her fall, all while she attempts to tug his hands away from her. She succeeds, and Jack allows himself a triumphant howl as it results in the snap of the cord that locks that damn amulet around her neck. Her wings shrivel up until they disappear altogether, and there _is_ something satisfying about the panic and shock that flashes across her face just before they both hit the ground.

Back at Santoff Claussen, Loki freezes where he’d been pacing back and forth, whispers, “There,” and disappears without so much as a by-your-leave. Thor blinks and is left to deal with the resulting uproar that comes in the wake of his brother’s abrupt exit.

Jack blacks out for a second and then he’s stumbling to his feet, amulet still clutched in-hand, ears ringing as he watches Vela lie still for a moment, before she wakes. His hearing returns just in time for him to hear gasp and wheeze as she sits up, groaning, and grasping at her chest in search of her amulet. Her head whips around to face him, wide-eyed and horrified.

“Jack!” Hiccup shouts from behind him, but Jack doesn’t even glance back at him, all his attention on the blurry figure of the traitorous Valkyrie in front of him, and her life-force, held firmly in the curl of his fingers. “Jack,” Hiccup says again, coming around his side, keeping some distance, but close enough for the frostling to see his shepherd’s crook held carefully in Fall’s hands.

Jack glances at him in acknowledgement but doesn’t say anything to the dragon rider. Instead he steps towards Vela, that rage from before still simmering just beneath his skin like an itch. He looks down at the amulet in his hand; a stone shaped like a tear-drop, something beautiful and foreign to this world. It was a gem that Freyja gifted every female warrior that she found worthy enough to join her ranks as a Valkyrie. It was the source of their power and immortality, and all Jack had to do was destroy it, and Vela would be mortal. “You were supposed to be my friend,” he croaks, voice over-used and soar from shouting himself hoarse.

“I _am_ your friend,” Vela insists, even now, and she is crying when he looks down at her.

It just makes him angry all over again. “What kind of friend presents them to their mortal enemy on a silver platter?” he shouts, voice cracking. “And for what? Some kind of sick, one-sided relationship?”

“It’s not!” The Valkyrie insists, “It’s not one-sided! Liath loves me just as much as I love her!”

Off to the side, Hiccup makes a surprised noise at the mention of Liath’s name.

“Does she? If that’s true, then why is it that the _first thing_ that she had you do was take me to her once she was free of Asgard?” Jack demanded.

“She needs power!” Vela says, like it’s just that simple. “In order to survive, she needs power, which _you_ can give her! You would’ve been happy in Valhalla, Jack. You would have had Pippa at your side, in _paradise_! It’s been waiting for you, all these years, and you can ‘wait a while longer’? There are people who would kill for such a chance, such an honor!

“But not Jack Frost,” she mocks. “Jack Frost, who has everything, but is always too bitter and too focused on his past to see what lies before him! You call me a traitor, say that I was supposed to be your friend. You have friends, Jack; people who love you, who would die for you, kill for you!

“What do I have? What _did_ I have? A cell to guard, a friend who I hardly ever saw, years spent guiding people to the gates of Valhalla; a place I will never have the chance to go myself! Do you think I have not lost people, Jack? My entire family is on the other side of those gates and all I see of them are glimpses!” She looks up at him, still sitting on the ground, nothing like the dignified warrior who fought at his side, or drank him under the table, or showed him how to properly stitch up a wound. This emotional woman is a creature that he has never encountered before. “Maybe you don’t understand it, but I love Liath, just as she love me. And I will kill for her, even if it means killing you.”

Jack looks at her, sees the truth behind her words, and feels his heart break. He lets his expression shutter, throws up every icy wall that he has ever built to keep others away from his heart and out of his head, and places them firmly between himself and a once great friend. He says, “Not if I kill you first,” and gives the amulet in his hand a tight squeeze, listening the gem squeal within his fist as Vela’s face screws up in pain, and her skin pales until it is the same shade of fresh white paper.

“Jack,” Hiccup says cautiously, in the same tone he uses when he’s trying to calm an untrained dragon. “You-” He cuts off suddenly, with a choke and a wheeze, and pain blooms bright in Jack’s chest. He stumbles and catches himself in a kneel, and turns to look at Hiccup as the shepherd’s crook falls from his hands, which come up to clutch as the hole that appears in his sternum as Liath removes her hand with a slick sucking sound.

Rapunzal gasps, stumbling into her husband’s side as pain blossoms in her chest. “Eugene,” she cries out, one hand presses under her collarbone, while the other grip’s Eugene’s arm as he pulls her close, eyes frantic and worried.

He opens his mouth to shout for help; they’d been pacing the halls of Santoff Claussen and are alone, but his wife starts to speak again, and he realizes what is happening. “Hiccup,” she whispers. “No.”

Merida rises from the couch in front of the fire place, up again to get yet another cup of coffee when the pain comes, striking dead-center. She pitches to the side, crashes into a side table and knocks over the stack of books that had been resting on top of it. Her mug goes flying and breaks when it hits the wood floor, but all the Summer Queen can focus on is that sharp burn in her chest. Even as the Sandman and Easter Bunny converge on her, asking confused and concerned questions, all she can do is choke out a horrified, “No.”

“No!” Jack shouts, rushing to Hiccup as he starts to drop, wondering where the hell Toothless is. He doesn’t make it to the Holly King, because Liath sweeps a hand out, throwing a row of icicles his way. He tries to dodge, but he is so unfocused that two still manage to catch him, one in the shoulder, the other in the arm, and Vela’s amulet flies from his hand, but that’s unimportant right now. He groans as he pulls the ice from his wounds and tries to shove the pain to the back of his mind as he smashes the two projectiles together, manipulating them until they take the shape of a blade. The next set Liath sends his way is swiped out of the air, but she seems undeterred as she steps carelessly over Hiccup’s limp form and towards Jack, picking up his staff as she goes.

Now he can’t even use his new weapon against her, lest he break his staff in the process, and he’s feeling weaker by the second as she drains his magic through the crook. “You were right, Jack. You’re very different from the boy I met all those years ago. You were so naïve back then, but now look at you. Three hundred and nineteen years old; you have become a bitter, spiteful, angry little sprite.” She continues stepping towards him, until she has backed him up to the very edge of the ruins of Bark, bare feet hardly keeping him from falling down to the angry tide below. Behind her, a familiar looking portal opens up. “But one thing still remains the same.” She traces her finger along the grooves of his staff, and Jack shivers, feeling the cold set in for the first time in his afterlife. “All your control has always been dependent on this,” she shoves the crook against his bloody, gaping shoulder, “little,” again, “stick.” This time, she strikes him hard, right in the center of his chest.

Jack feels weightless as he goes over the edge, and it’s only a second, but just over Liath’s shoulder, he can see his friends have emerged from the portal, and even though they look horrified, it’s still nice to see them one last time.

Then gravity tugs him down, and he’s falling.

“Jack!” their voices are a chorus that echo around the scant remains of a once great village, several of them already bursting into action.

Tooth and Sandy ignore Liath entirely, launching themselves over the cliff-side in search of the Guardian of Fun, but all they see is the violent turn of the water below, and the way arcing waves crash against the jagged wall of the cliff.

Behind them, the winter goddess hums low in her throat, twirling a familiar shepherd’s crook in her hands as the two fliers turn mid-air to face her. “Such a shame that he drained so quickly; his power always did leave the best after-taste,” she tells them with a sharp smile, and she tosses the staff their way. Sandy snatches it out of the air and stares down at it; at the worn cracks and grooves that have developed over the years, normally filled up with ice for stability. Now there is none, not even a soft fern of frost touches the ancient wood, and the Sandman’s heart drops. “You can have it,” says an immortal who has just placed herself in the position of first-place on his hit-list. “After all, it’s of no use to anyone, now.” Beside him, Toothiana shifts, and when he turns to face her, tears stain her tan cheeks in shining streaks, but her eyes burn with a fury that he has not seen from her in years, and her mouth and nose are twisted up in a dangerous snarl.

The last sister of flight does not resemble a bird or a woman as she draws her borrowed sword; right now, she is a different creature altogether.

Sandy looks up at North, expression solemn, signs silent, and an old wooden staff in hand. The former bandit looks like he wants to cry, but instead he sheds his coat and unsheathes his sabers, and shifts to the left as Aster moves right. Eugene keeps close to Rapunzel, throwing knives drawn, as she pours healing magic into Hiccup, but Merida steps forth, bow drawn and arrow nocked, the tip lit with fire. Liath has moved towards the Valkyrie, and she helps her to stand. Or she tries, at least, but Vela doesn’t get a chance to so much as get to her knees, before Sandy’s whip is picking her up off the ground and yanking her towards him.

“No!” Liath yells, throwing a hand out and freezing the sand-whip. She gets half-way through before one of Merida’s arrow is putting a bloody hole through her shoulder, cauterizing the flesh as it goes through. She shouts in pain, pressing her hand over the smoking flesh, and sealing it up with ice. The wound, she notes, is in exactly the same place where she put a hole in Jack. But that, she realizes, as she turns to snarl at Merida, is the point.

“One,” says the little fire-breather, and she nocks another arrow.

Liath moves straight for her and then jerks forward as a boomerang comes around and slices a nice, clean line along the underside of her cheekbone. The rabbit isn’t where she expects him to be when she turns her head to the left to look for him. In fact, he’s closer; close enough for a good, solid punch that has her slamming into the ground, skidding across rough terrain, and straight to the waiting arms—no, make that sabers—of Santa Claus, who immediately brings one of his weapons down towards her head. She flings her arms up, forming a thick barrier of ice above her to block the attack, but he just smashes right through it and swings his second saber down. Luckily for her, however, Vela has smashed through the ice-slick sand and freed herself from Sanderson’s grasp. Toothiana comes at her with a scimitar, aiming for the _neck_ , but even without her wings and added strengths given to her by her pendant, Vela is still a skilled Valkyrie, and she dodges—barely. Her blood feels warm and sticky as it slides down her neck, from the cut on the underside of her chin. It’s something that she hasn’t experienced in ages, that stick, warm mess; she has grown used to wounds that close up quickly. She forces herself to ignore it upon hearing her lover’s pained yell, and quickly disarms the Tooth Fairy, who is out of practice, but is unwavering and-and crying still, even as fury twists her bird-like features, and Vela holds her sword level with the other immortal’s neck.

“I loved him too,” the former Viking warrior swears, before she spins away, slicing through a tendril of sand that reaches for her as she runs across a space that has become a battlefield. She watches Bunnymund strike Liath and almost goes for him, but then she sees Nicholas St. North destroy her Winter Queen’s only protection, and she crosses the distance between them in seconds, bringing her sword up just in time to block a blow that would have made all of this for naught. It takes _so much_ effort, but she manages to shove North away just enough to grab Liath’s hand when her partner reaches for her and pulls her away from the large man. A man who, without his coat, looks far more like one of the many warriors that she’s guided to Valhalla’s gates and much less like the fat, jolly toy-giver that children world-wide believe him to be.

This is Nicholas St. North, the Bandit King, she thinks as she helps Liath stand. It’s the only thing that goes through her mind before her lover starts whispering to her, “Something is wrong,” the goddess hisses. “This is not how it was last time.” Vela doesn’t quite get it, but it doesn’t matter now, they have to find a way out of here. They are out-numbered, and the Guardians and Summer are closing in on them. Liath fumbles in her robes, while Vela tries to assess the situation.

She doesn’t get much of a chance, because the boomerang that strikes her in the head sends her tumbling into a world of darkness.

Liath bares sharp teeth at the Easter Bunny as he catches his projectile with a twisted smile that is more of an angry sneer. But it doesn’t matter, because she’s found what she was looking for. She pulls out the teleportation gem that Vela had stolen from Asgard. “Did you know that I taught Jack how to cook the rabbits he hunted—before that, he ate them raw.” She gives the gem in her hand a squeeze. Merida fires, but her arrow goes through them; Sandy’s whips do the same; no weapon can touch them—no _one_ can touch them. Just as she and Vela begin to shimmer away, Liath promises, “You’re at the top of my list now, rabbit. Don’t worry, I’ll be sure to cook your meat thoroughly; and I’m sure Vela will appreciate whatever I make for her from your pelt.” Her words linger in the air, even after the Ice Witch and the Valkyrie have disappeared.

“No!” Bunny shouts futilely, throwing his ‘rang and letting it lodge itself in a nearby tree. But his anger has nothing to do with the vanishing act and everything to do with all that came before it.

Merida lets out a shriek of outrage, making a motion, as if to throw her bow down but not going through with it in the end. In a three-foot circle around her, the earth is burned and scorched, and she lets herself drop down into the blackened dirt, reluctant tears streaking down her cheeks and dropping to the ground. Flowers spring up in their wake, but they wilt just as quickly as they grow.

Behind her, she can hear Rapunzel sniffling, hands still on an unconscious Hiccup, even though the worst of his wound is gone. Eugene touches her shoulder, but his expression is carefully blank, even as he tries to swallow around the lump in his throat.

Sandy hovers beside Toothiana, who is still where she stands, face still twisted in anger and lined with tears, one hand gripping the scimitar that Vela had knocked from her hand earlier. He reaches up to take her hand in his and pulls her towards the little circle of people that has formed, away from the cliff edge.

In the sky above, lightning skips across the clouds, thunder claps in the distance and below, two families mourn.


	11. Chapter Eleven

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Someone cuts Jack's funeral short with a dramatic entrance. North has a bit of a revelation. Merida speaks her mind and neither Hiccup or Jack are there to intervene this time. A plan is set in motion.

From the moment that Rapunzel and Eugene had invited him into their family, Jack had known that whatever decision he made in the end, be it Valhalla or his strange, new make-shift family with the Guardians and the other Seasonals, it wouldn’t be wrong. He couldn’t make the wrong choice, no matter what the others (aside from Tooth) were convinced of. Either way, he could make things work, which is exactly what he’d planned to do when he stepped into Vela’s home and told her that he had no intention of going to Valhalla. That hadn’t even changed at the mention of Pippa, because he knew that he would see her someday.

Of course, Jack thinks as he tumbles off the edge of a once great city, it seemed that he would be seeing his sister much sooner than he had originally thought.

Then something slams into him—mid-air!—and his eyes snap open to see the gray of the sky and the blue of the raging sea disappear, before his face is, once again, introduced to the ground. Although, this time, it’s less dirt and more rock.

He groans and shoves at whatever has decided to take up residence on his back. Another person, it would seem, as they laugh at him and roll away to give him space to breathe. And isn’t that laugh a tad too familiar?

“Cutting it a bit close, don’t you think?” he asks, or rather mumbles, into the dirt, before he finally makes an attempt to push himself up. He hardly makes it a few inches above the ground before he dropping back down, arms to shaky and weak to get him upright. There’s no laugh this time as Loki does him the kindness of rolling him onto his back. He squints down at the King of Winter, a face that Jack has seen immortal girls swoon over on a regular basis.

“She’s still draining power from you. How-?” He figures it out quick enough. “Your staff. You need to stop using your staff as a power conduit. Pull it back, cut her off, Jack.”

“I can’t,” Jack admits, feeling weaker by the second.

Loki is closer the next time the Winter King manages to open his eyes—and when had he closed them, anyway?

“You need to sever the connection to your staff, or Liath is going to drain you dry, Jack,” the trickster says irritably, no laughter in his tone now.

“I can’t,” Jack repeats, but this time his words are slurred; he feels exhausted. “You know I can’t. That damned thing is my power source.”

“No,” the other immortal says firmly. “It’s not—I know it and you know it. So cut the bullshit. We both know that that piece of junk has always been more of a conduit than a power source. You’re feeding that stick your power, and if you don’t stop, you’re going to die.”

Jack’s thoughts are hazy, but he tries to think on it and focus. Deep down, he knows that the Asgardian Prince is right. He’d clung to that staff his entire life because it was the only connection he had left to his past. It was the tool he’d used to save his sister, but three hundred years ago it had been his only possession, and that was all he’d known of it. After he’d remembered what had happened at the lake, he’d thought of the crook as his last connection to his life before Jack Frost.

But it isn’t now, he recalls suddenly, thinking of a little girl in Burgess, who is nearly a mirror image of Pippa Overland.

“I have to let go,” he says tiredly, and Loki doesn’t look at him with pity. Instead, he looks sympathetic. No doubt the magic-user understands what Jack is going through. He has children after all, and though Pippa was his sister, not his daughter, that doesn’t make it any easier.

“I know it’s hard,” Loki tells him quietly, “but your sister will still be waiting for you in Valhalla, Jack, whether it takes 300 years more, or one thousand.” He grips the younger man’s forearm and gives it a squeeze. “You’d be surprised at the lengths that siblings are willing to go through for you,” he says knowingly. “And anyway, from what I’ve heard, you’ve got quite a family waiting for you _here_. Just above us, in fact.” He looks up at the ceiling of the cave they’re in, and it hardly takes any time at all for Jack to realize where, exactly, they are. It’s one of the little caves that some of the dragons had carved into the cliff-side.

“You really need to work on your timing,” he tells Loki, who laughs at him.

The prince leans back on his haunches and asks, “Feeling better?”

Jack blinks at him and is surprised to find that he can no longer feel the gut-churning pull of Liath’s energy drain. He also no longer feels his connection to his shepherd’s crook. The tips of his fingers tickle, and he brings his hands up to his face to look; the usual frost that curls along his staff now crawls up his fingers. “Oh,” he says, because this has been happening for weeks.

I’ve been destroying the connection, he realizes. That’s why he’s been having such a hard time controlling his powers this past year; because he’s been fighting between disconnecting from his staff and conducting his power through it. He looks back to Loki, who quirks an eyebrow at him. “That was…yeah.”

The other man huffs at him and stands up. “Expecting something more dramatic? Maybe some bright flashes of light, a wondering sign that some great change has overtaken your very being? Sorry to disappoint, but things don’t actually work that way.” He holds his hand out to Jack. “Ready to rock and roll?”

The frostling huffs back at him and takes the offered hand, letting Loki haul him to his feet and catch him when he nearly falls right back over in an unpleasant retelling of his earlier make-out session with the cave-floor. He’d severed the connection for sure, but Liath had still drained him of quite a bit of power. “Never took you for the rock and roll type.”

“Are you kidding?” the prince says with a shark-like grin, “ACDC’s my favorite.” He lopes Jack’s arm over his shoulders and half-drags the weakened immortal towards the mouth of the cave. “Now hold on, the teleporting side of things can be a little rough, and you’re pretty banged-up as is.” He makes a face at the blood that is leaking into his clothes from the wounds in Jack’s shoulder and arm. Wounds that he currently can’t feel—thank you, adrenaline.

Up above, Liath had just escaped, putting an end to the battle, and the Guardians and Seasonals are beside themselves as they process all that has just happened.

All is silent with the exception of Rapunzel, murmuring insistently to her husband as they kneel beside Hiccup, who has yet to wake. “I can bring him back,” she whispers desperately, clutching at the crook of Eugene’s elbows as he holds her steady. “I can bring him back, just like I brought you back, we just have to find his body.” Tears are building in her eyes, breath catching as her husband looks at her sadly.

“I don’t think it works that way, sweetheart,” the former-thief says softly, swallowing down the lump in his throat as he tucks short brown hair back behind her ear.

She doesn’t bother holding back anymore, sobbing now, tears slipping down her face as her grip tightens on his arms. “I just got him back, Eugene,” she cries.

Merida closes her eyes where she sits, presses her hands over her ears and leans forward until her elbows dig into her thighs. But she can’t quite block out the trickster’s shaky voice as he says, “I know, blondie—I…I know.” The exchange makes her angry, that familiar fury burning within, and making for the perfect distraction from this disaster of a situation. Her sorrow evaporates, her own tears hiss from her cheeks in the form of steam as her temperature rises with her anger.

This is _their_ fault, she thinks to herself, because she needs somewhere to direct all of this unused energy right now, and a fight is the perfect way to get rid of it. Besides, if Eugene and Rapunzel and just _kept Jack occupied_ for a little while longer; if they hadn’t damn well _encouraged_ him to face Vela so early, he would still be here. He wouldn’t be some broken mass at the bottom of the sea. Blue eyes flick towards the Easter Bunny, whose ears are flat back, paws clenched. He’s watching her out of the corner of his eye like he’s _waiting_ for it, like he wants her to start something up just so he can join in. Her arms drop from her ears, ready for a good fight, and that’s when it happens.

At the center of their scattered group, a little column of light displaces the air, followed by a sound like the song of a sword being unsheathed. The Guardians arm themselves, but Merida recognizes what’s happening right off the bat. After all, she’s seen enough of Asgardian teleportation to know it on sight. She’s expecting Loki, which is fucking fantastic, because the asshole deserves a good beating for disappearing on them without a word and then not showing up to save Jack. What she’s not expecting is the person he’s holding on to. They pop in mid-air, which is the norm, and Loki lands in a crouch, but the person who’s hanging off him drops to his knees in a slump as soon as his _bare feet_ touch the ground.

“You were right,” says Jack, his voice like music to the ears of the many people who never thought they’d hear it again. “That _was_ a rough ride,” he slurs as he glances around at everyone else. “Man, you guys look like you’ve seen a ghost.”

Merida jumps to her feet, but it’s Bunny who reaches the pair first, and he hooks an arm around the younger man’s waist, taking his weight with ease. Loki lets him support their mutual friend, taking a step back when he sees the look that the other alien sends his way. A look that softens when he tilts his head down to look at Jack, who is clearly confused and exhausted, but very much alive. “Thanks for the assist, man. Loki wanted to carry me like some swooning maiden.”

“He’s injured badly,” the Asgardian says, still hovering within reach in case Jack does pass out and Bunnymund isn’t quick enough to catch him. But Merida gets the feeling that that isn’t even a possibility, considering the way that the alien is holding tight to Winter, paws adjusting every minute or so, almost roaming as if to confirm over and over that this is real; that he’s _actually_ holding Jack. “We should get him to a healer quickly. He’s lost a lot of blood, and Liath managed to drain him of quite a bit of his power before he cut his connection with his staff.”

Sandy touches down on the ground and picks up staff that he had tossed away earlier in all his eagerness to _destroy_ Liath. He brushes dirt from the old crook and looks to Jack with a sheepish grin. But the Guardian of Fun doesn’t smile back; he gets a little caught up with something else.

“Here,” Rapunzel says quickly, her smile beaming as she stands from Hiccup’s side with help from Eugene, who isn’t looking terribly agreeable with this idea.

Jack turns to give her a woozy smile, but it drops off his face like a stone when he spots Hiccup and remembers how he ended up with his own wounds in the first place. “Hiccup!” he shouts, the sight of his friend, covered in his own blood, bringing him out of his exhaust-silly state. Bunnymund barely keeps him from another painful introduction with the ground when he takes several halting steps towards his comrade; the other immortal is surprisingly strong for someone who has apparently been nearly sucked dry of his magical energy. He carefully helps the younger man over to the Holly King, who is still very much unconscious. Jack drops to a kneel—all he can manage at this point—and Bunnymund goes down to one knee beside him, not much choice in the matter. He watches at the little winter elf runs careful fingers over the newly-healed skin and tries to shove down the jealousy that shoots, sharp and bitter, through his chest. Jack is oblivious to this, only seeing the pink tinge that his friend’s nearly-healed wound has taken on and knowing that the dragon tamer still has a ways to go. “How is he?”

Rapunzel settles back down on the other side of Hiccup and places her hand over Jack’s. “I’ve done my best, but I don’t have my usual energy reserves, what with…” she trails off, and her friend’s eyes drop to her stomach, a little smile curling at the corner of his mouth.

“Right, wouldn’t want to do anything that might put little Jackson in danger,” the winter spirit says, grinning even with as tired as he is. “Or Jacqueline, y’know, if it’s a girl.”

Bunny does _not_ look as amused. “ _Little Jackson_?” he hisses, like the words hurt to say. Hell, the implication…

He hadn’t picked up any of Jack’s wintery signature from the child that Olwen was currently carrying, but that didn’t mean much. After all, the mother’s genetics were generally more dominant than the father’s.

“We are not naming my child any variation of the name Jack,” Eugene informs them under no uncertain terms, and Aster relaxes, not realizing that his anxiety has not gone unnoticed. “It’s Alex—we’re going with Alex.”

Rapunzel rolls her eyes. “ _Enough_ ,” she tells both men firmly.

“Wait,” Merida says loudly, “what child?”

Floating nearby, Sandy’s golden signs appear and disappear above his head in quick succession.

“Sandy is right,” says North, stepping closer and looking both tired and relieved. “We should go back to Santoff Claussen. Healing Yeti are there, medical elves; they will be able to patch up Jack and provide comfortable place to rest and heal, for all of us.” And a place to plan, he doesn’t say. Somewhere secure where they could better prepare themselves to finish Liath off. The Asgardian Prince, Loki, shifts in place, and North had all but forgotten his presence until then. Their eyes meet, and it’s clear that the other magic-user knows what the old wizard is plotting, but he doesn’t mention it.

“Well,” the prince says, rocking on the balls of his heels, “if that is all, I’ll be taking my leave.” He turns, as if he’s going to _walk_ back home, but then pauses. “Ah, but before I go.” He reaches into the pocket of his tunic and pulls a familiar pendent from within. Jack stares at it, surprised, and he’s clearly taken aback when Loki steps forward to drop what essentially amounts to Vela’s life into his hand. “Do with it what you will—in the meantime, we Asgardians will be on the look-out for Liath and Vela…if you allow her to live.” The winter spirit’s hand closes tight over the strange gem, before he reaches down to tuck it into his coat pocket.

“Thank you, Loki,” he says sincerely.

The immortal shrugs. “A life for a life; my debt to you is repaid, for now.” Thunder sounds overhead, bolts of lightning colouring dark clouds. “It would seem that my ride is here,” he says, looking up into the sky as rain begins to fall. “Get yourself healed up Jack, I think we both know that this isn’t the end.” With that, he finally disappears the same way that he and Jack arrived; in a flash of light and sound. “She’ll be back,” his parting words are an ominous whisper that carries on the wind, which grows angry and more violent in response.

The group seems to draw in tighter together, as though the close proximity could keep Liath away.

Aster’s grip tenses on Jack, who lets out a pained hiss. “Sorry!” the lagomorph says hastily, easing up, but not completely letting go. It’ll be a while yet before he’s ready to withdraw from his fellow guardian, and in the silence of his own mind, he finally admits to himself just why that is.

Never could do things the easy way, he thinks to himself with a mental sigh.

They make it back to Santoff Claussen without fuss, and it is there that everyone seems to either settle down or come to life. Everyone wants answers, obviously. They all want to know what went down with Liath; what happened to Hiccup; how Loki managed to save Jack in the nick of time. But he’s clearly tired and in serious need of medical attention.

Tooth and North shoo everyone clear of the infirmary (save a still-unconscious Hiccup and a newly-found Toothless) in an amusing imitation of doting parents.

Jack is drugged up to his eyeballs and well aware that he won’t remember most of the night come morning, but he is glad when Tooth settles gently at his bedside after the Yeti have stitched him up. North is just off to the side, half-heartedly arguing with one of the medical-elves and pretending that he isn’t listening in on the conversation going on between his angel and the trouble-making winter spirit, as Jack imagines he’s been labeled. But he doesn’t think on it too much, because Tooth settles into a steady stroking motion; combing thin fingers through his now-clean hair. He stares up at her as he doses, slipping in and out of consciousness as she hums to him. “See?” he says groggily, just as he’s finally drifting off for real this time. “Told you you’d make a great Mom.”

Toothiana’s hand goes still in his hair, and North freezes in place, barely four feet away, his side of the argument with Sergei coming to a rather abrupt halt. The Cossack even stops breathing, but he doesn’t realize it until he has suck in a great breath of air, which displaces the silence. He takes a step towards Jack’s bed, where the Warrior Queen still sits with her back to him, and he raises a hand to touch her, whispering, “моя любовь.” But she just shakes her head and takes in a shuddering breath.

“Just—I need a minute, okay?” she tells him, quiet and firm in her insistence, leaving no room for leeway.

Sergei has gone quiet and retreated and, though North hesitates, he reluctantly does the same.

He spends a moment in the hallway, trying to gather his thoughts, quickly coming to the realization that he’d been very wrong about everything he’d suspected of Jack and Toothiana’s friendship this past year. When the Warrior Queen had come to him and proposed a relationship, he’d assumed that her intentions had actually been to make Jack jealous, despite the sprites disinterest. North himself had fallen in love with the beautiful warrior for nearly a century now, but she had never seemed to return his affections. Or perhaps she had, and he’d just been too busy jumping to conclusions to see it.

He thinks back to gentle touches, soft smiles, and the way she would hover at his side, close enough for her feathers to brush against him.

Maybe Toothiana had gotten tired of his own obliviousness, and everything that had happened last year with Pitch and Jack had just been the kick she’d needed to _do_ something about it; something that Nicholas hadn’t had the strength to do himself.

 _“Told you you’d make a great Mom,”_ Jack had said, and the Guardian of Wonder recalls his angel’s insistence that the young immortal decide for himself what to do about the situation with Valka.

A few weeks earlier, she’d burst into his workshop, wings humming-bird fast, and a beaming smile on her face. When he’d asked what had her so excited, she’d admitted that she’d just received a visit from Jack, even as she pecked him on the cheek. It had riled him then, made him jealous.

 _“I’m so glad he’s with us,”_ she’d sighed. _“It feels like our family’s finally complete, you know?”_

 “I am an idiot,” North says decidedly. At his side, Sergei makes an agreeable noise, and marches down the hallway. He frowns after the rowdy elf and says, “They used to respect me,” he says as one of the Yeti—Brisbaine—passes him by with supplies for the medical ward. He pointedly ignores the incredulous expression on the fuzzy creature’s face.

By the time he steps into the globe room, a fight has broken out amongst Summer, Spring, and the trickster.

“You’re _really_ blaming us for this?” Eugene asks, tone clearly disbelieving.

“Well, _if th’ boot fits_ ,” Merida hisses back at him, the two of them practically nose-to-nose as they argue. “Ya basically sent ‘im off with a smile an’ a wave, didn’ think t’ consider that th’ rest o’ us should be consulted!”

“As far as we knew, Jack wasn’t in any danger!” Rapunzel says insistently. “He told us what he knew, and then he made his decision—to stay! How could we have known that Vela had helped Liath escape and was plotting to murder him? That’s insane!”

The other woman opens her mouth to say something, but Rapunzel keeps going, “And you actually think I would go to you or Hiccup for _anything_ that involves Jack? You forget, Merida, just who it was that sat with Jack for three weeks the first time you decided to take your anger out on him.”

“I don’t!” the Summer Queen says furiously, “I don’t forget anythin’ that I’ve done t’ Jack! I remember every moment and I regret it, because it _was_ wrong of me, to do th’ things I did, I recognize tha’! And I’ve apologized to Jack, over and over, and th’ daft idiot forgave me!” She blinks hard to stave off angry tears. “Did he ever forgive you?” she demands.

“What?” the other seasonal asks, and she sounds surprised, but she also looks like she’s waiting for something.

“No, of course he didn’,” Merida says with a tight, mean little smile. “Because ya probably didn’ even _ask_ for forgiveness. Ya probably didn’ even apologize before ya sent ‘im off. In fact, if I know Jack, he showed up t’ yer stupid little hide-away in the woods, and asked _you_ for forgiveness.” She tries to move around Eugene and when he goes to block her path to his wife, she draws up branches from wooden grain of Santoff Claussen’s floor boards, and winds them around him until he’s stuck in place.

“I swear, if you touch her-!” he spits, but the pyromancer ignores him, approaching Rapunzel, who looks shaken, but ultimately unafraid of her summer counterpart.

“And ya probably said something stupid and romantic like, ‘Oh, there’s nothin’ t’ forgive,’ and that was that.” Merida looks so mad it isn’t even funny. “He’s blamed himself for years for what happened between the two o’ ya. Once, we were in the middle of a fight, an’ I told ‘im it _was_ his fault, because he wasn’t good enough, because the infamous Flynn Rider could give you more than he ever could—and he _believed me_ ,” she chokes, looking sick. That particular fight was one they’d had just before Easter of ’68. Jack had been so upset that he’d just flown off, and Merida had been so disgusted with herself that she’d looked for him for weeks, all over the place. In the end, it was he who had found her, back at the castle, where she’d been drowning her sorrows in wine. Her brothers had had to _drag_ him into the dining room; she vaguely remembers hastily stitching up wounds with shaking hands. It wasn’t until afterwards, staring at him as he lay fever-stricken amongst fresh sheets, and picking dried blood from beneath her finger-nails that she’d wondered just why, exactly, he’d come to her of all people.

Everything had changed that day.

Now she stands hardly a foot away from the Polish princess, and her eyes flick down to the other woman’s stomach knowingly, before returning to look her right in her bright green eyes. “I wonder what his first thoughts were, when he found out,” she whispers. “Maybe something like, ‘If only I’d been good enough’.”

The petite spring goddess may not look it, but she packs a mean punch. Something she proves when she delivers a powerful right-hook to Summer’s heart-shaped face. E. Aster Bunnymund takes her by surprise when he steps in front of Merida, as if to _defend_ her, though he makes no move to attack. Rapunzel stares at him for a moment and then looks away, past him, to the other elemental, whose expression is fierce, even as a bruise mars her pretty features with dark colours. Then, quite suddenly, the Scottish princess is laughing.

“Well look at that, Spring Fling,” pyromancer says bitterly, “seems like ya got some fire in ya after all.”

“Enough!” North demands, and when Bunny looks at him, he makes sure his expression is extra disapproving. It is not a Guardian’s business to involve themselves in Seasonal affairs; at least, it hadn’t been. But now, with Jack, North isn’t sure where they stand. In fact, North isn’t sure of much of anything at all. But he does know one thing. “We do not have time to be fighting amongst ourselves when we could be tracking down Liath.”

Every face in the room that turns to him has a look of surprise on their face.

Sandy signs at him, _“But Loki said the Asgardian’s would be looking for Vela and Liath.”_

“Yes,” the former bandit agrees, “but they will be focused more on Valkyrie girl. And that will take time.”

“Because she no longer has her pendant,” Tooth’s calm voice comes from behind him, but he doesn’t startle, too used to having her around the shop by now to be surprised by her presence. Still, things feel strange between them as she sweeps forward to hover at his side. “She and Liath used a partial crystal to teleport out of Berk, but they’ll have already cleared out of Vela’s little pocket of space by now.”

“Right,” North agrees. “Asgardian’s will be searching for Vela, but it will be hard for them to track her. On the other hand, Liath took magic from Jack.”

Sandy’s eyes widen, and an understanding expression comes over Aster’s face. “She has Jack’s power, which means that she’ll also have his magical signature, and you bein’ a wizard…”

Nicholas St. North’s smile, usually one of joy, now holds a twist of grim satisfaction. “I will be able to track her.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> You guys didn't actually think I'd kill Jack off, did you? No Major Character Death warnings, remember?
> 
> So, yeah, this chapter took a lot longer to pop up than the other. My mom's cat had a major stroke last weekend, and we had to put her down. I had had most of the chapter typed up, but after that, I just couldn't push myself to finish it.
> 
> But! now it's here, and I hope you guys are relieved to see Jack back, whatever condition he's in.
> 
> One more thing--I've decided to turn this into a series. I'm going to finish the current plot, but there are still a lot of questions that are going to go unanswered. Like, what really went down with Jack and Rapunzel? What happened in '68? Why did Merida and Hiccup resent Jack for so long? And Jack and Aster still have a ways to go, which I'm hoping to take care of throughout the series. There's a lot more, but I think this note is long enough as it is.
> 
> In any case, I really hope you guys enjoyed the chapter.


	12. Chapter Twelve

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Hiccup isn't doing so well, and Jack is taking it hard. Tooth keeps secrets like she keeps memories; all but one. Aster gives in, but he doesn't give up, and in the process, he helps the Winter King do the same.

The next few days are hectic, to say the least. No one exactly _agrees_ to do any resting, but they settle in for it anyway, while North and Merida reinforce the defensive runes around Santoff Clausen, all the while arguing over the appropriate tracking spell to use in finding Liath. None of them are particularly surprised; after all, Merida is summer, and North is—essentially—associated with winter. Not to mention the fact that the wizard hasn’t seemed to approve of the seasonal from the very start.

Aster thinks it’s all a bunch of bullshit, feels like they’re just wasting time as one day passes, and then another, and one more.

“Does it even matter?” he finally demands, as the sun sets on the 3rd day, stressed and eager for something to do.

Because 3 days have passed, and while Jack is back on his feet, he isn’t quite back to himself. His magic, at the very least, appears to be returning, but with each day he spends sitting at the Holly King’s bed-side, the life seems to leave him a little more.

Lady Spring and the healers in the ward had shrugged Hiccup’s injury off in the beginning. “It’s going to take time,” the little brunette had admitted to Winter not two days ago. “Seasonal or not, Liath’s magic is different because it didn’t belong to her in the first place; it’s only natural that Hiccup take his time in healing.” She’d placed her hand over his, where it had grasped the dragon rider’s, but Jack hadn’t even glanced her way, much to Tooth’s surprise. Now, they were verging on day 4, and Fall hadn’t so much as twitched in his strange parody of sleep.

Jack hasn’t left his side since the day he woke up, and his dimming mood has everyone on edge—particularly Aster. That much is clear now, as he clenches and unclenches furred fists, letting his mouth run away with him again, as it so often does.

His words light a fire in Merida’s eyes, the expression on her face one that he hasn’t seen directed his way since before they came to their strange understanding back at Jack’s little hide-a-way in that damned shack in the woods. Her anger lights her up, brings a flush to cheeks that have gone pale over the last few days, but Aster doesn’t listen. He’s grown tired, and he doesn’t have the energy in him to argue over stupid spells. He pushes away from the table they’ve gathered at, ignoring the food on his plate, just as the rest of them have, and heads out of the room. Merida shouts after him, but he shuts the door behind him, drowning her out.

She’s essentially fuming as the door slams behind him, so tempted to pick up the nearest object and lob it his way, but she’s been working on not resorting to violence in this situation and it’s—well, it’s mostly not working, but right now she manages to pull herself together enough to reign in her temper. She sucks in a breath through her nose, expels it sharply through her mouth.

The winged-guardian is the one that goes after her lagomorph comrade. She says something on the way out that the Summer Queen doesn’t pay attention to. She pretends to focus on the spells that are spread out across the table, even as she feels uneasiness take its hold in the uncomfortable way Eugene shifts in the seat across from her. She holds up a hand to silence him before he can even open his mouth. “Don’t start with me,” she insists, not wanting to hear anymore negativity. Because there’s been enough of that of the last several days.

North is the one who speaks up though, and for once, he’s not his usual amount of condescending when he does it.

“I think that we can all agree that we are not giving up, yes?” he asks, looking around the table and a group that responds with tired nods and affirmations. “But these spells,” he picks one up at random and gives it a shake, “none of them have worked, and you and I both know why.” He looks at Merida, and she doesn’t have to look back to understand what he means. “We are missing a very important ingredient.”

Merida plops back down in her chair, slumps in a rather undignified manner. She shakes her head and goes, “Yeah, well, we can’ exactly do anythin’ about it when our _ingredient_ won’t help us.”

In the hall, Bunny’s ears droop, his shoulders slump, and for a moment he lets himself lean against the closest wall, accepting his exhaustion for what it is.

Behind him, the door to the dining hall opens, and he sighs. “Look, Sheila, I-”

“We’re been friends for decades, Aster,” says Tooth’s normally chipper voice, toned down now. “At this point, calling me by my name is practically a requirement.” She’s trying to sound jovial, Aster knows, but she doesn’t quite manage it, not that he blames her.

“I thought…”

“I know,” she tells him in a tone that sounds just as tired as his feels. She steps forward and rests a hand on his shoulder, fingers tiny and gentle, as she pulls him around to face her.

He doesn’t resist, just turns at her urging, and that’s how she knows that Aster has been just as affected as the rest of them. Not that it’s difficult to see; after all, he’s been by Hiccup’s room every morning, just as she has. But the queen knows that he is not there for an update on the fall bringer.

She averts her eyes when he’s finally fully facing her, and it’s hard for Aster to look her at her, because she isn’t hovering the way she usually does. Her wings are drooping, dragging along her back; her feathers are unkempt, head tilted down. The last Sister of Flight is not flying, and it makes everything feel wrong.

“If ya’ve come t’ scold me…” Go for it, he thinks, but doesn’t say.

Much to his surprise, however, his friend shakes her head. She takes in a shaky breath, and begins, “Before I sent Jack off,” her voice breaks, her eyes go watery, but she swallows and goes on, “we had a little talk, in his cabin.” She blows out a breath and blinks hard. “I’m still so mad at you, but I made Jack a promise, one that I thought I wouldn’t have to keep when Loki brought Jack back.” She laughs then, and the sound rings with self-deprecation. “But things aren’t looking good, and a promise is a promise.” She reaches for Aster’s hand, and he almost pulls away, because he knows that if he accepts whatever Tooth is about to give him, it means that he’ll also be accepting the idea that this is it; they’re giving up.

He doesn’t pull his hand back, though. Instead, he takes a breath, closes his eyes, and lets Tooth close his fingers around the object that she places in his hand. He immediately knows what she’s given him without even opening his eyes and it makes his chest ache; makes it hard for him to breathe.

Tooth steps around him, pauses to grasp his shoulder in a firm hold with her small hand, before she heads back into the dining hall. Though she does open the door, she does not enter—not yet. Instead, she turns her head to watch her friend carefully.

“My fault,” Jack had quietly told Toothiana that morning, as he’d held one of Hiccup’s hands, and she had held the other. It’s something that she still doesn’t understand, but a secret she nevertheless keeps to herself, just as she’s done with the rest of Jack’s secrets. All except for this one.

Aster doesn’t look at the painted egg in his hand. Instead, he slips it into one of the pockets of his bandolier, and heads down the hall to do something that he’s spent the last three days avoiding.

He heads to the infirmary to visit Jack. This doesn’t mean giving up, he thinks to himself rather firmly. This is just the motivation he needs.

Once the Easter Bunny is out of sight, the Tooth Fairy pulls her shoulders back and steps into the dining hall, letting the door shut behind her with a quiet ‘click’.

There’s a chilly bite to the air when Aster arrives in the medical wing. The hall way is cold enough that he can see his breath in the air, and there is frost all along the walls, but it’s not what he’s used to seeing. The delicate patterns that Jack usually leaves in his wake are gone, replaced with sharp and jagged design that reminds him of spiderweb cracks on a piece of broken glass. He reaches a hand out to touch it, feels it melt easily beneath the pads of his fingers and palm, and worries. He follows it down to the Holly King’s room, but the frost and the cold doesn’t touch the door frame or anything beyond it. It’s plenty warm enough to keep the comatose seasonal safe from even the slightest shiver. The same cannot be said for the rest of the hall, where the frost and biting air extends all the way to the end; to the open window that Phil stands near.

He’s expecting it, but when he approaches and _sees_ Jack sitting out on the roof, it still makes his heart stutter.

The Winter King has four other humans grouped around him—or, at least, they look human. Aster is too unfocused to pick up on it at first but, after a moment, he senses something off about them.

He doesn’t even have to say a word to get their attention; all he does is put a foot on the sill of the window, and all four of them snap around to look right at him, before quickly fading away in a swirl of wind and snow. It’s then that the keeper of Hope realizes just what they are. He shakes it off though—at least for the moment—and pulls himself out onto the roof, toes gripping for purchase. “Jack?” he asks cautiously, despite the fact that he knows that the winter elf is aware of his presence.

“Just needed a bit of air,” the other immortal says clearly and openly, like they’re having a conversation about the damn weather, which…might not be too far off.

“Feelin’ better, then?”

Jack snorts, brings up both hands to scrub at his messy white hair. The movement is jerky, and it shows off just how rattled the other man is feeling. Aster is so caught up in it that he isn’t paying attention to where he’s stepping; he slips, starts sliding down the shingles with a yelp. He’s not expecting the little fae to catch him by the bandolier, quick and smooth like he hasn’t been doing some healing of his own for the past 3 days. The kid should be feeling weak, at the very least, but he hauls Bunny back up to sit beside him like he weighs nothing, and the alien knows that he doesn’t weigh _nothing_.

“Thanks,” he says, after a brief moment of silence, because the usual kinetic energy that Jack gives off is absent, and it’s a strange thing that leaves him uncomfortable.

When Jack does talk, though, it leaves Aster feeling uneasy. “I thought I was going to die,” he admits, still not looking at the other guardian, who blows out a breath.

“So did I—we…we thought y’ _were_ dead,” the lagomorph admits. Then, just as uneasy, he adds, “I’m glad you’re not.”

Jack finally looks turns to face him, squinting like he’s not sure what he’s seeing. He says, “You really mean that, don’t you?” and Aster’s guilt feels like something heavy and physical, weighing him down.

“’M sorry I ever made ya feel like I didn’t,” he admits.

The Guardian of Joy thins his lips, eyes flicking down and to the side, and Bunnymund knows he’s remembering that day in the Warren. He thinks about it himself; thinks about the egg in his bandolier, but doesn’t mention it. “I…what I said that day…I was angry, Jack, and I,”

“Don’t,” the younger man says sharply, his tone so cutting that it startles the Easter Bunny. He looks angry for a second and then his expression clears, and he looks just as surprised as Aster feels; like he hadn’t been expecting his little outburst either. “I mean…I just want to move past it, okay?” He looks at Aster, eyes round and tone pleading. “I want this to work; I don’t want to be alone anymore.” He takes a breath, runs a hand through his already disastrous hair, and then lets that breath out.

The alien watches him carefully, concerned. After everything his comrade has been through during the past week, he can understand the urge to put it all behind him. But he can also see the anger that Jack is trying to shove down, and he has to bite his own tongue in an effort not to grind his teeth, something that has become a habit recently. “It’s okay to hate me,” he admits, even if it stings a little to say.

“Oh, good, now that I have your permission,” the frostling snaps. He sighs then, but it’s more like he’s forcing out a breath; forcing himself to let this go. He plants his hands on the shingles of the roof and moves to push himself to his still-bare feet, but Bunny latches onto his wrist in hopes of staying him. He gets the feeling now, though, that nothing could stay Jack, if the Guardian of Joy had the proper motivation.

“It’s okay t’ hate me,” Aster grinds out once more, “and it’s okay t’ be afraid,” he barrels on hastily, “t’ be afraid that he won’t wake up, and ya won’t ever get th’ chance t’ tell him how ya feel.”

Jack opens his mouth, his expression one of surprise, but this time it’s Aster who won’t let him get a word in (although he gets the distinct feeling that he’s done plenty of that in the past as well), and he says, “And yer not alone; ya haven’t been in a long time, and we’re gonna make sure that ya won’t be ever again.” He makes sure his voice is firm as he goes on, “But ya can’t keep bottlin’ things up, Jackie. ‘Cause, if ya do, it’ll eat away at ya, until there’s nothin’ left.”

Old Man Winter, as Merida jokingly calls him, goes through an array of facial expressions throughout Aster’s speech, but he’s stuck on surprise again by the end.

The Easter Bunny lets him go and waits.

The younger man stays in place and squints at his companion as he leans back against the roof. “Jackie, huh?” he asks, which gets a surprised look from Aster.

“Guess I’ll have t’ keep workin’ on those nicknames,” the lagomorph admits with a shrug, once he’s overcome his own startlement. He watches his fellow Guardian stand up and does the same himself, nearly sliding off the roof once more, only to be saved by the other man yet again. Jack makes sure that he makes it back into Santoff Clausen safely, before following him through. He shuts the window against the storm outside, which still hasn’t died down in the least, and that tells Aster quite a bit about the little ice-elf’s mental state.

“You’re wrong, y’know,” the Guardian of Joy tells him quite frankly. “I was alone for a long time; it might not have always been physical, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t true.” At his sides, his long fingers curl into pale fists, and the fractured frost on the walls thickens into layers of cracked ice. It covers his hands, too, crawls up his arms and neck, like some kind of defense. If he notices it, Jack offers no sign, and it makes Bunnymund wonder if he has any idea just how out of control his abilities are. It makes him wonder how the other creature is managing this at all, considering his staff is nowhere in sight. “And I’m not in love with Hiccup. I—I’m not in love with him.” I do love him, though, Jack doesn’t say.

Aster hears it anyway, as he watches the Winter King head back down the hallway. He doesn’t go back to his friend’s side, instead making his way towards the main room; towards the dining hall. The Easter Bunny lets out a weary sigh, glad to see Jack back in action, but very much aware of the fact that, despite their talk, nothing has changed.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So I received a message from a rather avid follower of this story, and they gave me the kick I needed to continue on. I'm very sorry that it has taken so long for me to get back to this story, and post the next chapter, especially one so short. A lot has happened since I started, including losing a chapter along with my laptop, but the person I spoke with gave me the inspiration I needed to keep going.
> 
> Originally, things were very different. Jack didn't feature at all, because something had happened to him, but I decided to go a different route. Hiccup's coma is a sad, but necessary, motivator for Jack. Don't worry, though, the Holly King will be just fine.


	13. Thirteen

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Jack relives some important and terrible moments in his life.

He feels sick and a little weightless; like he’s on a ride at the fair that’s taken a sudden drop and it left his stomach up in the air, without him.

“Jack, I’m sorry,” she’s stuttering out, while her hands clench and unclench in the fabric of her dress. It’s new, and her hair is short and brown, and there’s a ring on her finger. She looks like a queen; she looks beautiful. “I just…I fell in love,” she says it like it should mean something and it does. It means everything. The thief watches them from the background, looking tense, and wearing a ring that matches hers.

Jack stares at them both and smiles sadly. “That’s the problem,” he agrees hoarsely, and he lifts one shoulder in a half-hearted shrug. “So did I,” he says tightly and lets the wind sweep him away-

He banks a sharp right to avoid the burst of violet energy that comes screaming his way, and realizes too late that it’s just a distraction. When it does occur to him, it’s because he’s being knocked out of the air via full-body tackle, and the face-first landing in the muddied woods leaves him winded. Calloused hands turn him over roughly and pin him down at the shoulders, leaving him staring up into angry green eyes. “It’s all your fault!” the other sprite is shouting at him as those green eyes turn watery. Jack hates the way the young man’s tears feel as they freeze in their slow-slide down his neck, where they’ve fallen to. Above him, the warrior sobs and chokes out, “I should have just killed you at the start!”

“It’s not too late now,” the Guardian of Fun says quietly and-

He howls in pain and starts to edge backward, away from the threat and towards his staff. But the pain has him moving slow, and the sounds that the skin on his stomach and arm make are disgusting. Beneath the sticky, black layers the flesh tears and bleeds. He stretches his good arm behind him, trying to push back the hazy darkness that lingers at the edges of his vision, and it almost sounds like she’s laughing from where she stands over him. It takes him a moment to realize that she’s crying out as her shadow falls over him. “I’m so sorry!” she insists. Jack feels no relief at her words, not even when her heart-shaped face twists in horror as she looks at him and sees what she’s done. “Jack, please,” she begs, just as his hand closes down over his staff—

And he yanks it from the other immortal’s hands, shouting as he goes, “What have you done?” But he can hardly be heard as Notus howls her outrage and snow falls around them in blankets.

“I’m sorry!” his friend shouts, and at least he looks like he means it. “It was just supposed to be a joke, I didn’t mean for it to get this out of hand, Jack! I-I wasn’t thinking!” Jack hardly even hears the last bit when, suddenly, a particularly strong gust shoves him over, and he hits the snow-covered earth with a groan—

But that involuntary groan turns into a wheeze, and that wheeze turns into a cough that sounds like a damn death-rattle. He hurts, everything hurts, especially his ribs, which he suspects are broken. Just prying his eyes open takes effort, and he doesn’t even remember closing them. His vision is tinted pink; probably from the blood that’s pouring from the wound above his eyebrow. The blood-loss is making him whoozy, so he sees double when he looks up at his attacker.

“Bloody winter folk,” the stranger spits. “Ya could’a damn well killed someone! Maybe next time you’ll _think_ before ya pull somethin’ like this again!” the creature says, sounding angry and upset as he gestures to the area around them. But all Jack can focus on is his own cold, dark blood frozen to fur-covered knuckles. And his own hands-

His own hands are covered in blood that isn’t his own, fingers coated in thick ice, like the rest of him, but narrowed to sharp tips at the end. They’re still dripping with the viking’s blood—blood earned from the four deep gouges that he’d carved into the human’s neck. This man isn’t Jack’s first victim, and he won’t be the last if this war doesn’t end soon.

He hears a bird land close by, next to the body, probably a scavenger. It isn’t a bird at all, though, he realizes when he looks up—in fact, it’s a woman, and she’s got _wings_. They stare at each other, and he feels like he knows her, especially as she says, “Hello, Jack.” He clenches his fists, and his armor of ice-

It gives a sharp _crack!_ , and all he can do is stare as the frozen-over water beneath his feet splits, spider-webbed lines branching out around him.

“Jack?”

Her voice is quiet and soft, and he knows it like he knows every knot and groove in his staff.

“I’m scared,” she says, and his chest goes tight.

He looks up from the ice that is cracking beneath him, to the familiar face of his little sister. She’s a little older, a lot sadder, but no less perfect than the day he last saw her. She says, “I miss you so much, Jack,” and she sounds wistful, “I wish you were here.”

His heart breaks a little. “But I’m here, Pip. I’m _right here_. Can’t you see me?” he asks, voice breaking there at the end.

“Not yet, Jack; you’re not here yet,” she tells him, and she takes a step back. He mirrors her, reaching out and stepping forward, and with a familiar, sharp crack, he drops straight through the ice and into the murky darkness below.

It is cold, it is dark, and Jack?

Jack is scared.

So when he wakes up, he’s shaking, and that chill that always seems to surround him isn’t the comfort that he’s used to. Instead it sinks into his skin, and that cold feeling settles over him.

His eyes blur at first, when he opens them, and it sounds like someone is shouting in the distance. Then, suddenly, it’s right in his ears; loud and angry sounds that his sleep-muddled brain works hard to put into words, and then sentences.

“The bloody hell was that?” a familiar Australian voice hisses.

“I don’t _know_ ,” a lilting voice responds with an equal measure of rage in her tone. “ _Jack_ ,” she says, one warm finger tapping at the side of his face.

 

“Knock it off!” that other voice hisses, rough finger pads pressing against the side of his face to protect him from any further assault.

He blinks to clear the sleepy haze from his eyes and then blinks again as he takes in the audience that has gathered in the guest room at Santoff Clausen that he and Merida had taken over for this very purpose.

“What’d ya see, Frosty?” the red-haired witch inquires and everything about her is tense.

“Nothing,” he croaks, pushing himself up into a proper sitting position and seeing, when he rises, that it was the Easter Bunny who had been holding onto him. “It wasn’t Liath,” he admits tiredly, and now everyone in the room is tense and anxious. Jack can only imagine what each of them is thinking; every single one of them has a look on their face that spells out their thoughts right across their face. _Was it me_? They’re each wondering, but Jack doesn’t have the drive to say that it had been all of them. He doesn’t have the energy to play the blame game.

Merida is the first to recover. The guilt leaves her face almost as quickly as it comes, and she settles her focus right back on the mission, her determination as steadfast as ever. “I told ya to focus on Liath.”

“I _did_ ,” he insists, but even as he says the words, he knows it’s not true. Because every time he thinks of Liath, he thinks of her betrayal and the aftermath. That’s what he’d been focusing on, and it had resulted in him chasing his tail as soon as he’d entered the REM cycle. He slumps when he thinks about it, glances Bunny’s way when his furred hand settles on his shoulder-blade to support him, and tries not to read into it too much. Maybe that’s the problem, though, he thinks absently. He looks around the room and thinks about how hard it is to focus on that first betrayal when his audience essentially consists of people who have all betrayed him in some way and at some point in his very long life-span. He blows out a short breath and says, very quietly, to himself, “Let it go.”

The over-sized rabbit seems to be the only one who hears him, because he shoots him a sharp look out of the corner of his eyes.

His summer counterpart seems to notice something, as she squints at him, because she suddenly stands up, looking much taller than her 5’0” stature, and demands, “Everyone out! Jack and I need some time alone.”

Many of the people in the room look down-right mutinous at the very thought, but they file out—mostly quietly—at the sort-of reassuring nod that Jack offers when they look to him.

“I’m stayin’ right here,” Aster says firmly, a defiant look shining in his green eyes as Merida quirks an eyebrow his way, and Jack did his best not to read too much into _that_ either.

“It’s fine,” the Winter King tells her, even though he’s not entirely sure that it is. He starts to rearrange himself somewhat stiffly, making a point to pull away from the Easter Bunny, who jerks his hand back like he just touched the side of a glacier.

Which isn’t a bad way to describe it, Jack realizes as he takes everything in. The ice that clings to his fingers cracks when he flexes them, but it seals up just as quickly, clinging stubbornly to his skin. All around him, the same ice spiders outward from where he sits, once-delicate frost patterns replaced by sharp and angry designs that are more jagged ice than they are frost at this point.

“That’s something that we’ll address later,” Merida informs as she sits to face him. “For now, I think we’ve both got something else in mind.”

It’s harder for Jack to just dismiss the damage that he’d apparently caused during his dream, but he manages to drag his attention away long enough to scrounge up that irritation that he was feeling towards Merida. “I didn’t do anything wrong—I focused on Liath, just like you asked me to!” She holds a hand up as if to calm him; like _she’s_ the rational one.

“I believe ya,” she sighs. “It’s just…Jack, when ya were focusin’ on her…” she trails off, face going funny, like she’s not quite sure how to say this part, “were ya thinkin’…good thoughts?”

There is no way that his expression is anything other than incredulous, Jack decides. Hell, even Bunny is looking a little disbelieving at the Summer Queen, and she clearly sees that—it’s hard not to—because she rolls her eyes at them. “No, I know it sounds daft, but hear me out.” She goes on, “In order for this spell t’ work, ya have t’ focus on a time when you were close to Liath—not just physically, but emotionally as well. This magic bases itself on the connection between the two of you in order to find her, and you were never more connected than when-”

“When we were _friends_ ,” Jack finishes for her, his tone dark and bitter.

“Right,” his friend concedes, expression pinched, head tilted. She looks like even she doesn’t want to believe it, even though she’s the one who came up with the spell in the first place.

He offers her his most sardonic expression and says, “So basically you want me to think happy thoughts.”

Merida gives him a strange combination of a shrug and a nod. “Basically.”

“Awesome,” he grumbles sarcastically, leaning back until he flops back down onto the bed. “Well Tink, let’s get this show on the road.”

His counterpart shoots him a fiery expression that promises retribution for that new little nickname at a later date, before she starts chanting again.

Jack does his best to not think about what a stupid idea this is, and instead tries to focus on “happy thoughts,” as suggested. He manages to more or less narrow things down around the same time that he realizes that Sandy is back in the room. He doesn’t even have a chance to react before the face full of dream dust knocks him out.

When he opens his eyes back up, it’s because someone is blocking out the sunlight. And sure, he doesn’t _want_ to feel warm, or maybe it’s just that he doesn’t need it because he doesn’t feel the cold, but sometimes he likes to pretend, at the very least.

He’s expecting it to be a mortal; some idiot who was actually dumb enough to venture out into the snow. The storm has passed, one more blizzard that Jack couldn’t control done and over with, but he knows well that it’s still far too cold for a human to be out and about, no matter the time of day. He also knows that another storm is on the way; feels it in his chest and his bones, like it’s part of him. It’s an uneasy feeling, almost as frightening as the thought of having to watch this silly human get caught up in the middle of it and not make it to the next day. The scariest part of it all is the knowledge that it will be Jack’s fault, and he has no idea why.

She’s the last thing that he’s expecting when he pries his eyes open.

Liath looks radiant with the sun just behind her, blue hair long and loose around her shoulders, icy skin looking completely natural in their current stormy setting.

Jack doesn’t think that she’s the most beautiful thing that he’s ever seen in his life, because he’s seen some truly amazing things, but she comes very close. Her teeth are even gorgeous, sharp and pointed as they are. It’s something that he’s used to seeing amongst their kind. It would look odd on any other seasonal, but on this winter sprite, it’s a beautiful sight indeed.

It has him all caught up for a moment, the time he take to admire her, and he pushes himself up on his elbows, so that he can see her properly.

She speaks before he has the chance, and it’s a relief, because Jack isn’t sure he’s capable of forming words just this second (after all, it’s been years since he’s had anyone to talk to), “My name is Liath,” she starts off simply.

He scrambles to his feet in a way that is entirely undignified; in a way that doesn’t match the swift and smooth actions of the soldier he had played for decades on Viking battlefields. The way he carefully takes her hand in his, however, is a quick but careful movement that gives away some of the make-shift training that he's had over the years. He means to kiss the back of her hand, but he just ends up giving it a shake when the simple point of contact settles the energy that’s been building within him for the past several days. All he can do is stare at her, bewildered and dazed, as she smiles back with a sharp-toothed grin that seems, to him, more sweet than sinister.

“My name is Liath, and I’m here to help you,” she tells him that day.

It will be decades before Jack learns the truth.

For now, though, he just smiles.

In the waking world, Merida, Aster, and Sandy watch it all happen; paying close attention to every expression that crosses Jack’s face, from the irritation to the joy.

The Easter Bunny and the Summer Queen are, naturally, the very picture of frustration.

“Isn’t there any way for us t’ see what he’s seein’?” Aster asks, not exactly thrilled at the feeling of helplessness that has overcome him.

“I’d ‘ve already taken a peek if tha’ were th’ case,” Merida responds chidingly. “But, of course, th’ only ones who can see what Jack is dreamin’ about are the Sandman over there, and Princess Pixie.” She jerks her thumb in the direction of the door, where Toothiana hovers nervously, not exactly in the mood to pretend that she actually cares about whether they know she’s there or not. “Do ya really think they’ll let us take a peek at Jack-o’s very _private_ memories?”

Aster honestly considers guilting them for one terrible moment. His conscience is quick to make itself known, though. Instead, he flops back down into the chair that he’s been occupying for the past several hours and crosses his arms, feeling every bit the immature kit that he resembles.

“We wait,” Tooth says firmly, from her spot near the door.

Judging by the quick flash of symbols over Sandy’s head, he agrees.

It makes sense, he supposes, because these are the two guardians that Jack got along with best. They’re the only ones who tried to help him find his place amongst them; the only ones who didn’t tear him down.

The Australian space-rabbit tries not to feel bitter about it all, but he’s never been terribly good at that.

“This is a bad idea,” he says, although he doesn’t realize that it’s an opinion that he’s voiced aloud until everyone is looking at him.

Hell, even Merida is distracted for a moment, fingers twitching along the side of Jack’s right temple. She picks up exactly where she left off, so no one notices that something has gone wrong. Sandy and Tooth are focused on Aster, and Merida has her eyes shut again to concentrate.

No one sees the way that Jack goes tense all over.

None of them think to look at his fingertips, where the frost starts, before it continues on to crawl over his knuckles and wrists.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The dreams that Jack experienced in the beginning were originally outtakes. I never planned on posting them, but they just sort of fell into place when I started this chapter. They were also originally much more gruesome, and the characters involved weren't quite as forgiving.
> 
> Which is saying a lot, all things considered.
> 
> Btw, did you catch the Frozen reference? Couldn't help myself. Cold never bothered me--Oh...wait.


	14. Discontinued

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> I think the title is probably self-explanatory, but please tune-in for a very important update!
> 
> I really wish you guys could see the insanely sarcastic expressions I was making while I was typing out that sentence.
> 
> Wait.
> 
> No I don't.

This story has been discontinued!

However, it's also being rewritten and re-posted in a separate fic that you can find in the Card Tricks series.

The title is Counted Out.

It's already up, and I'm updating it with surprising frequency, given my history.

So! If you're still interested, please head over and check it out!

Thank you to everyone who stuck with me through this silly story, and are continuing to do so. You guys are the best and there would be no rewrite without you.

So, once again, thank you!

**Author's Note:**

> I don't own any of the characters in this story, nor do I own any of their respective movies. Vela the Valkyrie is all mine, though.


End file.
